Truck collision footage unrelated to Israel-Hamas war protest

This article is more than one year old.
Published on December 21, 2023 at 16:41
3 min read
By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA

Social media users are claiming a video shows a pickup truck with a trailer plowing through a crowd of protesters in Los Angeles, California calling for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas. This is false; the clip depicts a May 2020 incident that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma as demonstrations flared over the killing of George Floyd.

"A truck drives through a crowd of #Palestine protesters blocking the freeway in Los Angeles," says a December 13, 2023 post on X, formerly Twitter, from an account called "Salty Texan."

The page has previously spread misinformation -- including a false claim that another clip showed rioters storming private homes in Washington over the escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip.

Screenshot from X taken December 19, 2023

Similar posts spread the video across X after dozens of protesters brought a Los Angeles freeway to a rush-hour halt on December 13. The group behind the demonstration, IfNotNow, says it consists of "American Jews organizing our community to end US support for Israel's apartheid system."

Israel's relentless bombardment and ground offensive in Gaza have killed at least 20,000 people since early October -- mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The war broke out after militants associated with the Palestinian Islamist movement carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel, taking some 240 hostages and killing about 1,140 people -- mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Footage from the Los Angeles highway sit-in showed scuffles breaking out, apparently between protesters and frustrated drivers -- but the clip circulating online is unrelated.

"To my knowledge, no such incident took place last week in Los Angeles," Jaime Coffee, a spokesperson for the California Highway Patrol, told AFP in a December 20 email.

Reverse image and keyword searches reveal NBC News posted the same footage June 1, 2020 on YouTube. The news outlet reported it showed a vehicle driving through a group of Black Lives Matter protesters blocking Interstate 244 in Tulsa, Oklahoma (archived here).

The May 31, 2020 rally was one of many demonstrations across the United States that month after a white police officer in Minnesota killed Floyd, a Black man.

Katie Keleher, director of communications and community outreach for the Tulsa County District Attorney's Office, confirmed to AFP in a December 19, 2023 email that the video shows the protest.

Steve Kunzweiler, the Tulsa County district attorney, declined to charge the driver of the pickup truck, saying in a June 23, 2020 memo that the vehicle was attacked by demonstrators who had left the protected route for their protest to occupy the highway (archived here). Three injuries were reported.

One man paralyzed after falling from the overpass has filed a lawsuit against the state and other parties. Court documents say witnesses claimed they saw the driver brandish a weapon.

Other footage from local news outlets and Storyful, a service that verifies and licenses social media content, shows the truck hitting the crowd from other angles (archived here and here).

AFP geolocated the video circulating online to a stretch of I-244 in Oklahoma described in Kunzweiler's memo (archived here).