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| - Fact Check: Syrian boy's tears become fodder for fake news amid Israel-Hamas conflict
India Today Fact Check found that this is a decade-old video from Syria and has nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict.
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India Today Fact Check
This video shows a victim of the 2014 Syrian air strikes in the city of Aleppo.
A heart-wrenching video of a small boy yelling and weeping for his sisters, who allegedly died during Israel’s siege of Gaza, is making the rounds on social media. Those sharing the clip ( https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1046931422968859 ) claimed that Israeli soldiers killed his sisters.
One post containing the video read, “A little boy in Gaza grieving for his sisters sees no distinction between an Israeli soldier and a Western journalist spewing Zionist propaganda. One murders with a rifle, while the other murders with a pen.” An archived version of one such post can be seen here.
India Today Fact Check found that this is an old video from Syria and has nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Our Probe
A reverse search of keyframes from the viral video led us to the same video shared on a YouTube channel back in 2014. The description of the video stated that the video showed a Syrian child crying over the death of his sisters. That the video was shared almost a decade ago proves it has nothing to do with the present Israel-Hamas conflict.
We then found a longer version of the video in question shared by a Syrian media outlet called “Shaam News Network”. In this clip, the young boy could be seen sitting with another boy and a man holding a toddler. The description in Arabic, loosely translated into English, read: “Aleppo, Hanano residences, children and civilians surviving the violent bombing 4/14/2014”.
Further searches led us to a CNN report about Syria’s civil war — a peaceful uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that turned into a full-scale civil war in 2011. This report carried photos of Syrian residents, some protesting in different regions, and others injured during the government’s crackdown, across the years from 2011 to 2021.
In this report, we found a photo of the same boy who was seen weeping in the viral video. The description stated that these scenes unfolded on February 14, 2014, after an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria. Here, the photo was credited to Reuters. We then found this photo on the website of Reuters.
According to the description, this photo was shot by photojournalist Hosam Katan on February 14, 2014, in Aleppo.
It is thus clear that a 2014 video of a Syrian boy was falsely shared as a victim of Israel’s attack on Gaza.
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