Malay posts misrepresent unrelated photos as 'Israeli army officers taken into custody'
- Published on September 1, 2025 at 04:54
- 5 min read
- By AFP Malaysia
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"Dutch police arrested Israeli Major General Shaitan Shaul, commander of the armoured corps, this morning on charges of war crimes in Rafah," reads the Malay-language caption of a Facebook image shared on August 14, 2025.
The photo shows a man in handcuffs being escorted by law enforcement officers.
The caption goes on to claim he was arrested while on holiday at The Hague, adding that Dutch authorities are on a campaign to arrest IDF soldiers after the "International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a life sentence to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu".
The same Facebook account has also shared other photos alongside claims they show Dutch authorities detaining Israeli military officers.
Reverse image searches, however, show the pictured individuals are not linked to the Israeli military.
The ICJ has also not issued any ruling on Netanyahu -- though the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for him and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Israel's war in Gaza, including using starvation as a method of warfare (archived link).
The Hamas attack that sparked the war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed at least 63,459 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the UN considers reliable.
Unrelated photos
The first falsely shared photo was previously used in news reports by British newspapers The Telegraph and The Sun, which identified the man as Johnny Morissey, a UK national who was arrested in Spain in September 2022 for his role as a cartel enforcer (archived here and here).
The second photo, showing a policewoman handcuffing a woman who is lying face down, was previously shared on June 1, 2025 by the user AshnaGopal on DeviantArt, a platform for digital artists (archived link).
The owner of the account told AFP the photo was taken in the United Kingdom. The person who took the photo had not posted it elsewhere but gave the DeviantArt user permission to share it on their account, they said.
"This is actually a police training exercise, and the woman on the bottom is actually a student volunteer. You can see they are actually in a gym with a foam floor," they said on August 25.
The photo of a woman flanked by two men, one in a police uniform, was previously published by The Daily Mail in an August 2016 article titled, "Collapsed in the street, urinating in doorways and being carted off by police: It's just another Bank Holiday night on the Toon for Newcastle revellers" (archived link).
The photo's caption also makes no reference to the woman being an Israeli soldier.
The photo of a woman covering her face while a policewoman appears to escort her, was used in a September 2019 article by German daily Rheinische Post, which identified the woman as an Instagram beauty influencer who was charged with illegally injecting fillers into people's lips and noses (archived link).
A spokesperson for the Dutch national police, Lilian Scholten, told AFP that "no officers wearing a Dutch uniform can be seen" in the falsely shared photos.
Policemen in the Netherlands traditionally wear dark navy uniforms with bright yellow horizontal stripes across the chest and shoulders and are also equipped with utility belts and body cameras or other gear (archived link).
Belgian authorities in Antwerp did briefly hold and question two Israeli citizens attending the Tomorrowland music festival in July 2025 after they were accused of war crimes by pro-Palestinian groups (archived link). Their names were not made public.
AFP has repeatedly debunked false and misleading claims about the war in Gaza.
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