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| - Fact Check: This video doesn't show Hamas militants burning kidnapped Israeli woman
This video is from an eight-year-old incident in Guatemala. It has nothing to do with Noa Argamani, the 25-year-old woman who was kidnapped.
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India Today Fact Check
This video is from a 2015 incident in Guatemala, a Central American country. It has nothing to do with Noa Argamani or the Israel-Hamas conflict.
(Content warning: graphic violence)
Videos of Noa Argamani, a 25-year-old woman, being kidnapped by what appeared to be Hamas militants were widely shared online in the aftermath of the group’s surprise assault on Israel. Argamani, an attendee at a music festival near Gaza, was seen being driven away on a motorcycle by a group of men.
Now, a video surfaced on social media that purports to show the same woman being first assaulted and then burnt alive by a mob. Several posts made the same claim while sharing either the video or screengrabs from it.
India Today Fact Check's investigation, however, found that this video is from a 2015 incident in Guatemala, a Central American country. It has nothing to do with Noa Argamani.
Our Probe
We reverse-searched the viral video's keyframes on Google and found media reports from 2015 featuring similar videos of the same girl. According to a CNN report from May 2015, the video showed a 16-year-old girl being beaten and burned to death in the Guatemalan village of Rio Bravo.
Reportedly, the girl was killed for her alleged involvement in the killing of a taxi driver. This incident received extensive coverage in international media in May 2015.
According to the Daily Mail, the unnamed girl and two other men allegedly shot a 68-year-old taxi driver, robbed him, and fled. The girl took a wrong turn, was surrounded by a vigilante mob, and suffered the horrific fate captured in the video.
The video was widely circulated in Guatemala at that time and provoked an outcry on social media. According to the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre, the taxi driver was killed for refusing to pay extortion money. The report also said that residents of Ro Bravo received intimidating messages for having lynched the girl, who was allegedly the daughter of an incarcerated gangster.
A longer video of the incident was published by Al Jazeera on May 29, 2015, on its YouTube Channel.
While many news outlets have reported unverified footage of a woman who looks similar to Noa Argamani seen drinking water in an alleged Hamas safehouse, at the time of writing this report, no concrete evidence of what happened to her after her kidnapping has been documented.
It is, however, clear that the video in question is over eight years old and has no connection to the Israel-Hamas war.
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