In Gaza, “even the dead” flee from bomb scares. This is fake

Since September 23, Israel has been carrying out intensive airstrikes on Lebanon, which have so far killed over 700 people and injured several thousand. On Friday, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli attack on the southern suburbs of Beirut. Up to a million Lebanese from the south of the country may have been forced to flee from their homes.

The Israeli army is also conducting military action in the Palestinian West Bank. After her actions in the city of Kabatiya, an internal investigation was initiated – recordings appeared online showing her soldiers throwing the bodies of three dead Palestinians from the roof of a building in the city, – September 21 she gave BBC.

Meanwhile, messages are circulating in Polish social media suggesting that the funerals of the victims of Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip are staged.

“When there is a warning siren of Israeli shelling in Gaza, there is no shitting in the bushes. Everyone who can runs away. Even the dead. How many times can you die in front of the camera. Unfortunately, the world falls for images such as IAF shelling, which causes suffering for ordinary residents of Gaza” – convinces anonymous user of website X (original spelling of all posts) in a post from September 24, 2024. IAF is an abbreviation for Israeli Air Force.

The recording attached to the entry is to be evidence of this. It shows a group of eight people carrying an allegedly deceased person on a stretcher, wrapped in a light shroud. More mourners follow behind them. As the warning sirens sounded, the group puts the stretcher on the ground and runs to find shelter. Other participants in the procession do the same. After a while, the alleged deceased breaks free from the shroud and also runs away.

The post with the recording has been viewed over 220,000 times. times.

“This war is quite cheerful”; “He came to life, he rose from the dead, well the area obliges”; “So these bombed hospitals are fake. Everything is clear! After all, the most humanitarian army in the world would not bomb a hospital”; “Palestinians should win an Oscar or a golden raspberry”; “There are a lot of Lazarus in these areas. “Acoustic revival”; “They are doing quite good Bollywood competition” – this is how some Internet users commented on the recording.

However, not everyone believed the message. “But it's not a gauze recording…”; “Isn't this from a few years ago?” – they wrote.

So we checked where and when the situation in the recording took place.

The video, which is popular on the Internet, was checked by a German-language fact-checking portal in 2023 Correctiv.org. It turns out that the recording was already circulating online two years ago, in May 2021. At that time, Internet users also wrongly believed that it was related to the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas, notes the editors of the German website.

On website X, journalists from Correctiv found an English-speaking one entry with the same video. It was published at the end of March 2020, more than four years ago. The description reads: “A fake Palestinian-style funeral to beat the curfew. See what happens when [uczestnicy] they will hear police sirens” (editor's translation).

Moreover, on March 25, 2020, the YouTube channel of the Syrian news website Orient News (discontinued in 2023) published video titled: “A mock funeral in Jordan staged to circumvent curfew has ignited trolls on social media.”

The presenter explains that the staged funeral took place in Jordan. The aim of the “mourners” was to avoid curfew.

And indeed, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jordan initially declared a state of emergency. Then, on March 21, 2020, it introduced a complete lockdown and curfew. At that time, there was a total ban on moving around the country, except for emergency situations such as funerals.