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| - Fact Check: 2005 photo from West Bank shared as Russian soldier holding Ukrainian girls at gunpoint
Anti-Fake News War room (AFWA) probe has found that a 2005 photo from the West Bank was shared as Russian soldier holding Ukrainian girls at gunpoint.
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India Today Fact Check
This photo was taken at West Bank's Hebron in November 2005. It shows Palestinian students and teachers protesting intrusive searches of children by holding classes on the road outside an Israeli checkpoint.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, February 25, accused Russia of targeting civilian areas as the invasion force reached Kyiv. A photo that asserts alleged Russian highhandedness towards Ukrainian civilians was tweeted by several people. The said image showed a bunch of girls held at gunpoint by a soldier.
"This is unacceptable. Russian soldiers invading #Ukraine threaten a group of young girls as #Putin defies NATO with a military invasion," one person tweeted.
Similar claims have been archived here and here.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found this claim to be misleading. The photo was shot in the West Bank in 2005 during a protest in front of an Israeli checkpoint.
AFWA probe
The girls in the photo donned hijabs. Around one per cent of Ukrainians reportedly follow Islam. So, there was a probability that the claims alongside the photo were authentic.
A reverse search of the image, however, revealed that many of the top results were blogs that talked about the Palestine-Israel conflict. A blog written by one Hussam Ayloush was one among these. In a post titled "Why Zionism will fail", we found the image now shared as from Ukraine among the long list of pictures shared with this blog post published on April 27, 2010.
The image was found on two more similar websites — both uploaded in 2010. While the image was published in the blog Occupied Palestine on October 10, 2010, Inminds.com carried it on August 17, 2010. Both these sites claimed the photo to be from an Israeli-occupied area, though no names were mentioned.
This confirmed that the image is older than the Russia-Ukraine border conflict that started in 2014.
Further searches led us to a November 2005 BBC photo story on Palestinian students' protest in West Bank. The report talked about how students protested against "intrusive searches" by Israeli forces by holding classes in front of an army checkpoint in Hebron.
The fifth picture in the story was the now-viral one. "Dozens of the schoolchildren tried to burst through the checkpoint, but soldiers warned them to stop," the caption read.
We cross-checked this claim with the prominent news agency AFP. Similar images from the same period were available in the photo section of the website.
"Palestinian students push an Israeli barrier in the West bank city of Hebron as they protest after the army erected a checkpoint blocking their way to school, 22 November 2005," AFP had captioned the photograph.
This confirmed that the image shared on Twitter as that of a Russian soldier intimidating Ukrainian girls is not related to the ongoing war. It was taken in 2005 in Hebron during a protest by students at an Israeli military checkpoint.
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