US congresswoman shares post misrepresenting photo of dead Syrian children
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on October 17, 2023 at 23:05
- 4 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"CHILD GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE. 614 Palestinian children murdered by the Israeli IOF Forces #Gazagenocide," says an October 14, 2023 post sharing the photo on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
The post from Sulaiman Ahmed, a self-described journalist who has shared other disinformation about the war between Israel and Hamas, shows a line of dead children wrapped in white cloth.
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The image spread across X, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms as Israel blasted Gaza with air strikes, flattening entire neighborhoods and killing some 3,000 people at of October 17 in the densely populated territory, which is governed by the militant group Hamas and has been under a blockade for years.
US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim and has been critical of Israel, re-posted Ahmed's post before quickly removing it, according to screenshots social media users and media outlets captured.
Professional basketball player Enes Kanter, who is of Turkish descent, also featured the photo on his page.
"Every war is a war against children!" Kanter wrote in his October 13 post. "Stop The Bloody War!!!"
Hundreds of children have died in the conflict. The human toll was expected to rise as Gazans flock to the southern part of the Palestinian enclave following Israel's warning of a ground offensive against Hamas, whose fighters stormed across the border on October 7, killed more than 1,400 people and took some 199 hostages in the worst attack Israeli history.
But the photo does not show child victims in Gaza.
Reverse image searches show the same image on stock photo websites and in media outlets such as United Press International, National Geographic and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (archived here, here, here and here).
The picture, which was also released to AFP by the Syrian opposition's Shaam News Network, shows the bodies of children wrapped in shrouds in Ghouta, Syria, according to its caption. The photo was taken on August 21, 2013.
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Syrian rebels said the children were killed in a chemical weapons attack by President Bashar al-Assad's forces, which killed more than 1,400 people near Damascus.
A civil war erupted in Syria in 2011 after Assad's regime brutally cracked down on pro-democracy protests. The ongoing conflict has killed more than 500,000 people, reduced cities to rubble and displaced half of the nation's pre-war population -- while also roping in foreign countries and global jihadists.
Graphic footage from the same day on Shaam News Network's YouTube page shows deceased children in similar shrouds (archived here).
A spokesperson for Omar acknowledged that the picture was misrepresented online, saying that is why the Minnesota congresswoman removed her re-post.
"The Congresswoman retweeted it very briefly, and immediately took down the retweet when she learned it was not from Gaza," Jeremy Slevin, Omar's senior advisor, told AFP in an October 17 email.
Ahmed, whose post Omar amplified, also acknowledged in a follow-up post that the image is from Syria.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war, including other misrepresented imagery of children from Syria.
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