No, this video does not show migrants in France but a demonstration in Israel

The caption of the July 13, 2019 Facebook post reads: “This is in Calais. Our children will never forgive us for allowing this to happen. When they are adults with their own children they will look at the society around them and question the sanity of those people who continued to vote for those that created the hellish world that they will be living in. There is no other political, social and cultural ideology that can stop this other than Nationalism.” 

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Screenshot taken on July 15, 2019 of a Facebook post

Although most publications featuring this video are in French, several English-speaking users shared the same video on Facebook with similar misleading captions, all claiming that it was shot in Calais.

What does this video show?

The roughly 15 seconds of footage shows people, some with their faces concealed, throwing rocks on a highway. It depicts a demonstration following the death of a young Israeli of Ethiopian origin, killed by an off-duty policeman in unclear circumstances. The Ethiopian community denounced it as a racist crime.

AFP covered the demonstrations, during which Israeli police clashed with members of the Ethiopian community as shown in the picture below.

How did we find the origin of the video?

We ran the video through the InVID tool that AFP co-developed. The analysis tab is useful to know if a specific video has already been published on the web. It chops the video into several still images and compares them to databases from several search engines.

On Google and Yandex, we found links in Russian referring to a demonstration of Ethiopians in Israel.

However, this was not enough to find the source of the original video.

We used Google Translate to write“Ethiopians throw rocks” in Hebrew. We then typed the result in Google and found a link to a video shared on Twitter early on July 2, 2019 by 13 News, an Israeli news channel. 

מחאת העדה האתיופית | מפגינים משליכים אבנים במחלף גדרה pic.twitter.com/G0Z287bqHm

— חדשות 13 (@newsisrael13) 2 juillet 2019

Situation in Calais

Migrants used to build blockades to slow down incoming trucks to try and hide in them to cross the Channel and the UK border, however the number of such blockades has decreased in recent years, from 865 in 2016 to 26 in 2018.

Migrants regularly die trying to get to the UK through what is known as the “Calaisis,” the area surrounding Calais. In 2015, 18 died there, while four died in 2017 and 2018, according to French authorities.