Posts falsely claim video shows Egyptians supplying water to Palestinians
- Published on October 30, 2023 at 08:02
- Updated on October 30, 2023 at 08:52
- 8 min read
- By Tonye BAKARE, Sarah KHORCHI, AFP Nigeria, AFP France
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Reshared more than 11,200 times, the post features an 18-second clip showing hundreds of people carrying makeshift backpacks across a desert.
“These are civil Egyptians crossing the Palestinian border to deliver water and foodstuffs to Palestine (sic),” reads an X post shared by a Nigerian account on October 13, 2023.
The same video was shared in a similar context by other X accounts, including here, here and here, on Facebook (here and here) and on TikTok. The claim was also shared in French.
Hamas militants stormed into Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, and killed at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials.
They also took more than 200 hostages, among them elderly people and young children, based on Israel’s count.
Israel has responded with heavy air and artillery strikes that have killed more than 7,000 in Gaza, according to the latest toll from the Hamas health ministry in Gaza (archived here), and plunged the Palestinian territory into a dire humanitarian crisis.
Israel also cut off water, food, fuel and energy supplies to Gaza, and only a trickle of aid has been allowed in from Egypt under a US-brokered deal (archived here).
However, the claim that the video shows Egyptians crossing into Palestinian territories to supply aid is false.
Cigarette brand clues
Using the InVID-WeVerify video verification tool to analyse keyframes from the misleading clip, AFP Fact Check found that the footage had been online for at least a month before Hamas stormed into Israel on October 7, 2023.
An X account called “Mahamat M Adam Bechir” published the clip on September 7, 2023 (archived here). The caption suggested that it was taken at the Egyptian-Libyan border.
Some online users commenting on the post said the video showed cigarette smugglers.
A keyword search for “Egyptians Palestinians” on TikTok revealed several videos (archived here, here and here) published in different languages in October 2023 with the same claim about Egyptian aid. They feature similar locations to the one seen in the misleading footage shared on X.
In one of these TikTok clips published on October 14, 2023, men remove big white boxes with a red design from the bags they carry.
Twelve seconds into the footage, the boxes with the letters “h” and “p” can be seen lying on the ground.
A keyword search for “hp cigarettes” led to an image of a cigarette brand on a Singaporean e-commerce website called Lazada (archived here). The cigarette is described as “HP Red American Blend”.
A reverse image search of the picture on Lazada led to a Facebook page called H&P Cigarettes (archive here), which describes its activity as a “tobacco company”. Several posts list phone numbers starting with +92 alongside the names of cities Lahore, Peshawar, Karachi and Multan, suggesting that the company is located in Pakistan.
Backpack inscriptions
Another TikTok video shared the misleading claim in Spanish on October 14, 2023. The translated text reads: “Egyptians crossing into the Palestine Territory to deliver food and water to the people of Gaza. God bless you.”
The footage once again shows men carrying large white bags with Arabic writing.
The Google Lens tool translated the words to mean “Qadourah” and “Abu Samleh,” which are surnames with no specific meanings. The word in the middle is the number “717”. AFP Arabic-language reporters confirmed that this was the correct meaning.
Apart from the Arabic inscription, three dark stripes forming an elongated circle shape with the letters "O", "R", "I" and "S" are visible through the bags’ fabric.
A keyword search for “Oris Cigarettes” led to the website of a cigarette brand by the same name and featuring the same logo seen through the backpacks (archived here).
Another keyword search for “Oris cigarettes country” led to a report published by Moodie Davitt Report, a business-to-business news site (archived here). The report identified Oriental General Trading as the maker of the cigarette brand.
A search for “Oriental General Trading” led to the company’s website, which says the firm is a “manufacturer, brand owner, distributor and travel retailer” based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (archived here). Among its products listed on the site is the cigarette brand Oris.
The logo clearly matches that of the one seen through the bag fabric.
Egypt-Libya border
A keyword search for "Libya-Egypt smuggling border" in Arabic led to a video published on Facebook on June 16, 2022 (archived here).
The video shows men in a desert with rectangular bags similar to the ones spotted in the misleading claims.
“Egyptian smugglers document their journey crossing the Libyan-Egyptian border, smuggling unknown contrabands. They take advantage of the lax security at the border between the two countries to move around as they please,” reads the Arabic-language caption.
The same keyword search also led to a YouTube video (archived here) posted on June 13, 2022, by a channel that mostly publishes content about cattle. It shows groups of men with similar white makeshift backpacks walking across arid land resembling the landscape seen in the TikTok and X clips. The Arabic caption explains that it shows "smuggling at the borders of Egypt, Libya and Salloum”.
Another YouTube video by an Egypt-based account that publishes news content showed cigarette smugglers again in a similar environment, with the narrator geolocating them in “Sallum” (archived here).
A keyword search for “Sallum” on Google Maps showed that it is a coastal town close to the Egypt-Libya border.
The map indicates that it is sandwiched between the Mediterranean Sea and a desert.
Returning to the misleading clip in the original claim shared on X, we searched for visual clues as to whether the footage could have been taken in Sallum. Four seconds into the video, we spotted a building with a curved roof behind a wall in the background.
Further investigation of the Sallum and the Egypt-Libya area on Google Maps revealed a building at the border post that matches the features of the one in the misleading video.
The border post is also visible in this video published on Facebook (archived here) by the Information and Decision Assistance Centre of the Council of Ministers of Egypt on September 24, 2023.
Screenshots show the building with a curved roof on Google Maps and in the Facebook video.
Clip deleted
During our analysis, AFP Fact Check came across a longer version of the clip see here, here and here with the logo “K24” in the top left corner and ending with the caption “Kurdistan24.net”.
Kurdistan24.net is a news outlet based in Erbil, Iraq (archived here). A search of its social media pages and website yielded no results for the misleading clip shared by online users.
Contacted by AFP Fact Check, Kurdistan24’s social media chief Zheer Ziyad confirmed that the clip had initially been published on October 13, 2023, along with the Egyptian aid claim.
“When we checked the video, we discovered that it was old, from 2020; we immediately removed it from all our platforms,” Ziyad said.
The renewed conflict between Israel and Palestine has generated a wave of misinformation online. Follow our coverage here.
October 30, 2023 Corrects spelling of 'near' in summary paragraph
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