Staged fight scene falsely shared as 'Hamas supporters attacking Israeli girls in France'
- Published on November 27, 2023 at 08:26
- 3 min read
- By Devesh MISHRA, AFP India
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"Hamas supporters tried to molest three Israeli girls while passing through an underpass in France, and the result is in front of you," reads part of the Hindi-language caption of a video shared on Facebook on November 15.
The 27-second video shows a group of men seeming to harass three women in an underpass. The women then appear to beat them up before fleeing the scene.
The video also has been overlaid with text that purports to show a channel on Telegram and a WhatsApp number. AFP did not find the channel on Telegram or the number on WhatsApp.
Hamas militants poured across the border on October 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials.
In response, Israel launched a military campaign to destroy Hamas, killing nearly 15,000 people, mostly civilians and including thousands of children, according to Gaza's Hamas government.
There have been growing tensions in France, home to large Jewish and Muslim communities, as the Israel-Hamas war rages.
More than 1,500 anti-Semitic acts and comments have been recorded in the country since the outbreak of the war, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on November 14. This was a more than three-fold increase compared to the whole of 2022.
He said there had also been anti-Muslim incidents "but they are not on the scale of what we are seeing in terms of anti-Semitism".
The video was shared with a similar claim on Facebook here and here, as well as on X, formerly Twitter here.
However, the clip actually shows stunt students practising a street fight scene according to the organisation that originally uploaded it online.
Staged video
A logo bearing the letters "CUC" can be seen on one of the men's clothes at the 0:07 mark of the video.
A keyword search on Google found the logo belongs to Campus Univers Cascades (CUC), a French professional training centre dedicated to stunt techniques for movies (archived link).
Lucas Dollfus, director of CUC, told AFP on November 22 the video was staged.
"This is a video produced with our stunt students as part of a training exercise on the theme of 'street fight'," he said on November 22. "Everything is prepared in advance, and everything is choreographed. We are sorry that the video has been diverted and misinterpreted."
The same video -- without the watermark or the WhatsApp number -- was uploaded on the verified Instagram account of CUC on November 2, 2023 (archived link).
The post's caption contains several hashtags including "cinema" and "choregraphy".
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (left) and the video uploaded on Instagram by CUC (right):
The same Instagram account also features other fight scenes.
Reuters featured the French stunt school's women students in 2021, saying its women enrollees increased with the growing demand for female superheroes in the film industry (archived link).
AFP has repeatedly debunked misinformation related to the Israel-Hamas war here.
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