Post passes off video game content as footage of war between Israel and Hamas

"A video that shows a major war held between #Palestine and #Jewish Israel. Victory to Muslims," reads a Facebook post published in Afaan Oromoo, one of Ethiopia’s major languages, on October 9, 2023.

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Screenshot of the false post, taken on October 17, 2023 

The post has been shared more than 2,100 times and viewed over 390,000 times.

A video of more than nine minutes in length published in the post shows anti-aircraft guns destroying fighter helicopters.

Most of the 700 comments side with either Israel or Hamas, reflecting a hostile religious debate in Ethiopia that, broadly speaking, associates support for Israel with Christians and the backing of Hamas with Muslims.

Religious tensions are not new to Ethiopia where Christians and Muslims make up major religious communities (archived here).

With an unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza and concerns about a wider regional war, US President Joe Biden pledged his country’s support to Israel during a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on October 18, 2023 in Jerusalem (read AFP's coverage of the conflict, archived here).

Biden’s visit came hours after a projectile or fragment from a rocket exploded in the grounds of the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital in Gaza (archived here).

Both sides in the war have traded blame for the bloody carnage, but neither the provenance of the strike nor the death toll could be immediately or independently verified.

However, the video circulating on Facebook does not show fighting in Israel or Gaza.

Gaming video

AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the footage.

The search results revealed that the video was originally added to Facebook’s gaming section by a page known as "BILAL The Gamer" in August 2023 (archived here).

The page says it "serves the best gaming content in town".

The original video is 15 minutes long with an English-language caption reading "Advanced Missile Destroys Massive KA-52 Battle Helicopters - ARMA3".

ARMA 3 is a tactical shooter simulation game that allows players to experience realistic combat gameplay (archived here).

Scenes from the game are commonly used in misleading claims linked to global conflicts, as debunked by AFP Fact Check here, here and here.

AFP Fact Check compared the two videos and found the setting and the action were identical in both.

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Screenshots of the original video (left) and the one in the false post, taken on October 17, 2023

Further searches unearthed a part of the game’s footage on YouTube — a segment of the video that has also been falsely linked to the Israel-Hamas conflict (archived here).

AFP Fact Check has debunked other gaming videos claiming to be from Israel and Gaza here, here and here.