Old video of soldier shot in battle falsely shared as 'Hamas fighter killed by Israel'
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on November 15, 2023 at 02:48
- 3 min read
- By Chayanit ITTHIPONGMAETEE, AFP Thailand
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Warning: Graphic video
The 16-second clip was shared on X, formerly Twitter, on November 2, 2023, with a Thai-language caption that reads: "Hamas group fights against Israeli army and one got shot dead."
It shows a group of uniformed soldiers crouching behind a dirt wall. One of them is shot in the head after standing up to shoot at their opponents.
The clip surfaced after Hamas fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking at least 240 hostages, Israeli authorities said.
Israel has responded with relentless air and ground operations on Gaza which have killed more than 11,300 people -- including thousands of children -- according to its Hamas-run health ministry.
The same video has been shared thousands of times alongside similar false Thai-language claims here, as well as in English, Hindi and Turkish.
But the video is in fact unrelated to the current Israel-Hamas conflict and has been published since at least 2014 alongside reports about the battles with the IS group in Iraq.
Old news reports
A Google reverse image search using keyframes from the clip found a similar video uploaded to a video-sharing website (archived link).
"One of the 'defenders of the sanctuary' was shot and killed during the fighting against Daesh (ISIS)," reads its Persian-language caption, which uses another name for IS.
The term "defenders of the sanctuary" is often used to describe those who work on behalf of Iran in Syria and Iraq.
Further keyword searches on Google found a longer version of the same video was published by Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet on October 29, 2014 (archived link).
"This is how IS shot an Iraqi soldier," the Turkish-language headline reads.
According to the Cumhuriyet report, the video was recorded by an Iraqi soldier and captures the death of a fellow fighter after he was shot by IS in Fallujah, west of Iraq's capital Baghdad.
In late 2013 and 2014, IS expanded from Syria into Iraq, capturing Fallujah and declaring the establishment of a "caliphate" or Islamic state (archived link).
This led to widespread violence and displacement -- at least 100,000 Iraqi Christians were forced to flee, AFP reported (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (left) and the video published by Cumhuriyet (left):
Content warning
The same video was also published by other Turkish news organisations in October 2014, including here, here and here (archived links here, here and here).
AFP has debunked a wave of misinformation surrounding the Israel-Hamas war here.
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