Father and daughter coping with bombardment are Syrian, not Palestinian

"A Palestinian father tells his daughter that the sounds she hears are the sounds of toys that are there to make her laugh," reads the Urdu-language caption of a Facebook video shared on October 11, 2023.

"Little does the girl know that the sounds are not from toys but from ruthless Israel's merciless missiles."

The video, which has been viewed more than 2,800 times, was shared days after Hamas militants stormed across the highly militarised Gaza border into Israel on October 7, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 240 hostage, according to Israeli authorities.

Following the attack, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and retaliated with air strikes and artillery shelling of targets within Gaza.

Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry says the war has so far killed more than 18,600 people, mostly women and children.

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Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on December 11, 2023

The clip was also shared elsewhere on Facebook here, here and here, where it was viewed hundreds of times.

Comments on the posts suggest users believed it was recently filmed by a Palestinian family.

"First time I am crying after seeing a toddler laughing," commented one user.

Another said: "May God help the oppressed Palestinians. Amen."

But the video, which was also recently debunked by Pakistani fact-checking organisation Soch Fact Check, in fact shows a father and daughter in Syria in 2020 (archived link).

'Laughing off the shelling'

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the video led to the same footage used in news reports from 2020.

The video was posted on the official YouTube channel of The Guardian newspaper here on February 18, 2020 (archived link). The same video was posted on the website of the UK-based newspaper here (archived link).

The video is titled, "Syrian father teaches daughter to cope with bombs through laughter".

Below is a screenshot comparison of a false Facebook post (left) and The Guardian video (right):

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Screenshot comparison of a false Facebook post (left) and The Guardian video (right)

Part of the description of The Guardian video reads: "In video posted on social media, Abdullah Mohammad and his daughter Salwa, three, can be heard laughing at the sound of shelling in Syria.

"Mohammad, who moved his family from Idlib to Sarmada district, has tried to insulate his daughter from trauma by telling her the noise of bombs is part of a game."

Syria's 12-year-long civil war has left more than half a million people dead and millions more displaced internally and abroad.

An AFP report from February 19, 2020 said the family fled from Saraqeb, which had been partly levelled by air raids.

The report explained that the north of Idlib was "a dead end for hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced from other former rebel bastions across Syria".

It adds that hundreds of people, many of them children, had been killed as "pro-regime bombardment spares nothing, from homes to hospitals".

The clip was also used as part of an AFP video about the father and daughter (archived link).

The family later left Syria for a new life in neighbouring Turkey, according to a report from March 4, 2020.

Mohammed told AFP he was happy he would no longer have to invent games to gloss over the horrors of Syria's civil war.