Old Gaza explosion footage misused in posts about India-Pakistan
- Published on May 9, 2025 at 10:16
- 3 min read
- By Chayanit ITTHIPONGMAETEE, AFP Thailand
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"India attacked Pakistan," reads the Thai-language caption of a May 7, 2025 Facebook post.
The post includes footage of multiple nighttime explosions. The video bears the logo of Pakistani news outlet ARY News, which shared the clip on its page.
The video was released by the Pakistani army's media wing to news outlets including AFP after the Indian strikes.
The footage surfaced in other posts written in Thai, as well as Burmese, Hindi, Sinhala and English. Urdu-language TV channel 92 News and Thai PBS, Thailand's state broadcaster, also misrepresented the footage in reports about the conflict between India and Pakistan.
The nuclear-armed rivals experienced their worst violence in two decades after India launched deadly missile strikes on its neighbour, with days of repeated gunfire along their border escalating into artillery shelling (archived link)
New Delhi has blamed Islamabad for backing an attack on tourists in the Indian-administered side of disputed Kashmir two weeks prior -- a charge Pakistan denies.
Islamabad said 31 civilians were killed by Indian strikes and firing along the border. New Delhi said 13 civilians and a soldier had been killed by Pakistani fire.
The video, however, is unrelated to the crisis.
A reverse image search using keyframes led to an X post published by Al Jazeera Palestine on October 13, 2023 (archived link). The Arabic-language caption reads: "Scenes showing violent Israeli raids on Beit Lahia, north of the Gaza Strip."
Additional keyword searches found the same clip in a TRT Haber report on October 13, 2023. The Turkish outlet said Israel carried out strikes on 320 targets overnight, killing around 400 Palestinians (archived link).
Sharing a screenshot from the same video, Lebanese news outlet Al Manar also reported the same day that Israeli strikes forced evacuations in Gaza (archived link).
A Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official data.
The Israeli offensive launched in retaliation for the October 7 attack has killed at least 52,653 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas-run Health Ministry, which is considered reliable by the United Nations (archived link).
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the India-Pakistan clashes here, here and here.
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