Footage of "moving bodies" misattributed to the Israel-Hamas conflict

Context

On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants launched a surprise attack from the Gaza Strip into surrounding Israeli communities, killing residents and tourists. In response to the attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the country was now at war with Hamas and conducted multiple airstrikes in Gaza. According to the Associated Press, on October 18, the death toll passed 4,000, thousands have been wounded on both sides, and more than 423,000 Gazans have been displaced.

Misinformation related to the Israel-Hamas war has swept across social media. One video posted on X (formerly Twitter), with over 200,000 views, shows "bodies" lying on the ground covered in white shrouds to appear like corpses. The "bodies" then move, showing that they are not actually corpses. The tweet links this video to the recent events in Gaza and states, "And that's how they didn't win [the] Oscar." The insinuation is that the footage shows actors pretending to be casualties in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

In Fact

The footage is unrelated to the current Israel-Hamas war and dates back to 2013. A community note attached to the X post links to the original video on YouTube. This video was uploaded on October 28, 2013, by the Egyptian news site Elbadil. The YouTube video shows the same scenes as the video shared on X. 

According to the video description, the video was taken at Al-Azhar University and shows a representational display of corpses as part of a demonstration by Muslim Brotherhood students. The demonstration took place in front of the college administration building.

The YouTube video also has Elbadil's logo in the top right corner. This same watermark is also visible in the video shared on X. Therefore, the footage can be confirmed to be the same footage uploaded by Elbadil in 2013. The video has been misattributed to current events in Gaza.

This is not the first time this video has been misattributed to Gaza. A fact check by AFP investigated the footage in 2021 following claims that the footage showed "Hamas propaganda" and that it was a staged display by Hamas to gain sympathy. Islamophobic posts from 2014 on the Nigerian English-language forum Nairaland also shared the footage and claimed it showed Gaza. The misattribution of this footage to events in Gaza is not new. It has been misattributed to claim that Hamas is staging and faking casualties.

The Verdict

The video is from a protest in Egypt in 2013, unrelated to the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.