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| - A video being shared on social media which some are claiming shows Palestinians “faking atrocities” is unrelated to the Israel-Gaza conflict. But the video was actually taken in Malaysia before the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October.
The footage circulating on X (formerly Twitter) has more than 900 shares, with a screenshot also being shared on Facebook, and shows a number of bodies wrapped in white shrouds on the floor of a room.
Near the end of the clip, one man wrapped in a shroud whose face can be seen, opens his eyes, looks at the camera and appears to begin speaking. Some versions of the post just include a screenshot of the video showing this man.
Arabic text overlaid on the video and screenshot, when translated into English, reads: “#Gaza Circus” and “I don't know if the problem is with Israeli bullets or something else, but it seems that they are coming alive one by one”. Some versions are watermarked with the handle of an Instagram account which shared it in November 2023.
A caption shared with the video on X says: “Genocide in Gaza......” with an emoji of a laughing face.
However, this video wasn’t taken in Gaza.
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The clip has been online since at least August 2023—before the attack by Hamas on Israel on 7 October.
The video, without the text added on top and with a different audio overlaid, was uploaded to TikTok on 19 August 2023 with a hashtag mentioning Malaysia and a caption partially in Malay.
A native Malay speaker told Full Fact the caption in English says: “The deceased were once part of the Pochong gang.”
This appears to be a joke, as a pochong, or pocong, is a ghost known in Malaysian and Indonesian folklore that wears a burial shroud and haunts graveyards.
The same clip was also shared in August 2023 on Instagram, with a caption in Malay which (when translated to English) describes it as showing a “funeral management course”.
Malaysian fact checkers Malaysiakini said the video was likely filmed at a mosque in a college in Pahang, Malaysia.
We also matched features of the room where the video was filmed with a number of photos shared by the college on its Facebook page.
Full Fact has written a number of times about videos or images which have been incorrectly captioned to claim to show those in Gaza faking images of harm to civilians during the war.
It’s important to check whether what you see online is what it claims to be. Our guide to verifying misleading videos can help you do this.
Image courtesy of Jon Candy
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