Video of Palestinian movie crew misrepresented as 'staged' war footage

"WATCH: Video shows the war between Palestine and Israel is being staged like a movie," says an October 8, 2023 post viewed more than 210,000 times on Telegram, a messaging platform.

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Screenshot from Telegram taken October 13, 2023

The video shows a crowd of people huddled around and appearing to lend instructions to a boy, who lays on the ground with his leg twisted and a red liquid splattered behind his head. Hovering about him is a large movie camera.

The clip spread in several languages and across platforms such as X, the site formerly known as Twitter, in the days after Hamas gunmen stormed across Gaza's border with Israel on October 7 in a surprise assault that sent the region spiraling into war.

Hamas fighters killed more than 1,400 people -- most of them civilians -- and took approximately 150 hostages. In response, Israel has flattened neighborhoods in Gaza in a series of air strikes, killing at least 2,750, most of them ordinary Palestinians.

On October 16, aid agencies called for vital humanitarian supplies to be allowed into the Gaza Strip, warning that time was running out to save millions of people as water supplies dried up and food and fuel stocks dwindled.

But the video being shared is unrelated to the latest hostilities and does not prove the violence has been "staged," as the posts online claim.

In fact, the clip shows behind-the-scenes shots from a Palestinian movie set.

A movie set

By searching on TikTok for the handle seen in the posts shared online, AFP traced the clip to an April 21, 2022 TikTok post (archived here) from an account with a similar name, which says the video shows a behind-the-scenes view of the filming of a movie.

The April 2022 short film, called "Empty Place," used actors to depict the story of Ahmed Manasra, a Palestinian boy who in 2015 became a symbol of a wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence. The shot in question -- showing the actor playing Manasra on the ground with his leg twisted -- appears at approximately the 1:10-minute mark of the film.

The owner of the TikTok account sharing footage of the scene's production, Mohamad Awawdeh, shared two other videos that captured the filming of the same moment from different angles (archived here and here).

The film's closing credits list Awawdeh as a camera assistant. Director Awni Eshtaiwe also mentioned Awawdeh in a post about the production on Facebook (archived here).

Reached by AFP, Eshtaiwe said in an October 12, 2023 message that the clip circulating online shows the making of "Empty Place."

Awawdeh's videos were previously misrepresented in 2022 by social media users claiming they showed Palestinians faking a child's death at the hands of Israeli soldiers. The Arabic fact-checking service Misbar and other media outlets debunked the claims at the time.

Manasra

An Israeli court sentenced Manasra to 12 years in prison after he was found guilty of the attempted murder of two Israelis in a 2015 stabbing attack alongside his cousin, though his sentence was later reduced to nine and a half years.

Manasra, who was 13 years old at the time of the incident in a Jewish settlement neighborhood in annexed east Jerusalem, was hit by a car as he and his cousin fled. Video footage showed him as he lay on the ground bleeding, surrounded by Israeli onlookers shouting abuse.

His cousin was shot dead by authorities.

News outlets including CBS published the 2015 video of Manasra on the ground -- which is graphic -- to YouTube (archived here).

AFP has previously debunked other misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war here.