Fake headline spreads unsubstantiated claim on Ukraine-Hamas link
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on November 8, 2023 at 16:05
- 3 min read
- By Natalie WADE, AFP USA
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"Weapons supplies from Ukraine to Hamas have tripled over the past month," says the supposed headline shared in a November 3, 2023 post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Similar claims circulated elsewhere on X and other social media platforms, including Facebook and TikTok.
The posts come as Israeli forces continue to bombard the Gaza Strip one month after Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack, in which fighters killed more than 1,400 people -- mainly civilians -- and took some 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said more than 10,000 people, mostly women and children, had been killed in Israel's campaign as of November 7. Some 16 hospitals across the besieged territory are no longer functioning because of damage from strikes and the lack of fuel, the ministry said.
The conflict has sparked a torrent of misinformation online -- including the supposed Washington Post headline.
A spokesperson at the news organization told AFP in a November 7 email it did not publish this story.
A reverse image search found The Sun, a British tabloid, published the photo of the weapons in the posts in a June 13, 2022 YouTube video (archived here).
The report attributes the clip to the Russian Defence Ministry and says the country's forces had seized US weapons in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the supposed Washington Post article does not appear on live or archived versions of its website -- and a keyword search for the author's name in the screenshot yielded no results related to the news organization.
AFP found no publicly available evidence that Ukraine is supplying Hamas with weapons.
The country's Main Directorate of Intelligence pushed back on such allegations in an October 9 Facebook post, saying they were part of a "Kremlin disinformation campaign" (archived here). The United States has allocated billions of dollars for Ukraine since Russia's invasion in February 2022, but defense officials have previously said there is no evidence Kyiv has diverted the aid.
More of AFP's reporting on misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is available here.
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