Video from Syria misrepresented as Israeli snipers targeting Palestinian children
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on December 13, 2023 at 21:38
- 6 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"CHILD SHOT AT IN SCHOOL BY ISRAELI SNIPER," says a December 12, 2023 post on X, formerly Twitter.
The video posted by Sulaiman Ahmed, a self-described journalist who has shared other disinformation about the war between Israel and Hamas, shows rooms of children shrieking in panic as adults rush to rescue and treat others wounded across a school's campus.
Ahmed's post has since been deleted.
But similar posts racked up views across X, more than two months after Hamas militants plunged the Gaza Strip into war with a bloody October 7 attack that Israeli officials say killed 1,200 people.
Israel's air strikes and ground offensive have left Gaza in ruins and killed more than 18,600 people, mostly women and children, according to the latest toll from the Hamas-run health ministry.
Philippe Lazzarini, chief of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, on December 12 criticized video footage that emerged of Israeli forces blowing up a UN-run school in northern Gaza.
But the video shared online is unrelated -- and it does not show Israeli snipers targeting schoolchildren. It was filmed in Afes, a village in the governorate of Idlib, Syria.
Video from Syria
Using reverse image searches, AFP uncovered a longer, less narrowly cropped version of the same footage on YouTube that appears to show a sign for the Al-Shuhadaa School in Afes (archived here).
Voices in the video also mention Afes as they speak using what AFP journalists in the Middle East recognized as a Syrian dialect of Arabic, and a car carries what appears to be a Syrian license plate.
Keyword searches for the school in Afes then revealed several Syrian media organizations, social media pages and journalists who posted the same clip -- or parts of it -- to X and other platforms on December 2 (archived here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
The posts say the recording shows students injured, crying and screaming after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime forces hit the facility with artillery shelling.
The first moment when the school was targeted in the town of Afes, east Idlib causing fear and panic among children. pic.twitter.com/s4tc2utwfi
— Levant 24 (@Levant_24_) December 2, 2023
Journalist Ahmed Rahhal, who also shared the footage, told AFP in a direct message on X that a teacher captured the film (archived here).
The December 2 shelling struck the schoolyard as the boys and girls were playing outside, injuring three children and one teacher, according to reports from the nonprofit Syrian Network for Human Rights, Al Jazeera and the White Helmets rescue group -- whose volunteers responded to the scene (archived here, here, here and here).
An aerial picture the White Helmets posted of the destruction shows a basketball hoop and other features from the schoolyard that appear in the longer versions of the video AFP found online (archived here).
The group also shared photos of its workers treating one of the schoolchildren from the clip, who is identifiable by his haircut, his red jacket and the wound to his head (archived here). The boy also appears in photos from Turkey's Anadolu News Agency (archived here).
And additional footage Rahhal took and posted of himself at the blast site shows the same classroom where a bleeding child was picked up off the floor in the video spreading online (archived here).
The civil war in Syria erupted in 2011 after Assad's crackdown on pro-democracy protests.
The ongoing conflict has killed more than 500,000 people, reduced cities to rubble and displaced half of Syria's pre-war population -- while also roping in foreign countries and global jihadists.
AFP has previously debunked other misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war, including misrepresented visuals from Syria, here.
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