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| - Misleading: These videos are not related to cargo ship attacks in the Red Sea
Recent attacks by Yemen’s rebel group Houthi against commercial ships in the Red Sea have made headlines around the world. The news also prompted plenty of misinformation going viral online globally.
According to BBC News, Houthi forces declared support for Hamas and initiated attacks on ships in the Red Sea after the Israel-Hamas conflict broke out. Western countries called for a halt to the attacks, and formed a task force to guard cargo ships, but Houthi forces stated they intend to continue targeting ships they believe are associated with Israel.
Annie Lab found multiple questionable posts with videos claiming to show military or commercial ships being attacked by Houthi. We debunked one such claim in mid-December last year, but there have been many more.
We looked into two recent videos and found them to be misleading.
The first one posted on X shows an old man on a boat passing a burning ship. The user claims the clip depicts “Yemen’s Houthis attacking ships in the Red Sea despite the presence of the US Navy.”
It was posted on Dec. 26, 2023, and has over 2,800 likes and 600 reposts at the time of writing. The same video has also been circulating on other platforms; one TikTok post, for example, amassed nearly 4,900 likes and 460 comments.
We can confirm that this misleading clip was edited from a longer video.
We found a 47-second footage uploaded on Facebook on Dec. 6, 2023, which seems to be the source material.
All previous posts made from this account called Qtrfish show fishermen documenting their lives in the sea. And the account’s history shows that they have been posting similar content since 2016.
The same old man appears in several videos and photos posted under this account.
On Dec. 7, 2023, the same account also posted another video that seemingly depicts the same incident from a closer view. The Arabic text displayed on the screen translates to “Opposite Khasab Port” in English.
We also found other social media posts around Dec. 6, 2023 on X, all in Arabic, mentioning the fire in Khasab.
We compared the videos and figured out that they captured the same burning ship from different angles.
To further understand the content of the video, Annie Lab translated the dialogue with the help of a postgraduate student studying Arabic at Peking University. The old man said in the video that a ship caught fire in Khasab.
We tried to geolocate the place on Google Earth and found that the mountains seen in the background of the video are likely situated between Mirellas’s Island and Khasab Castle in Khasab.
Video of a sinking warship also misleading
Annie Lab also looked at a TikTok video posted last month, featuring a warship being hit by a shell. The user claims that Yemen attacked an Israeli ship and released a video recording.
It has over 85,000 likes and nearly 6,000 comments as of this writing. A similar video was also found on X, which implied a U.S. vessel was sunk by Yemenis. This tweet has over 3,800 likes and 1,000 retweets.
However, Annie Lab found that this clip has also been edited from a longer recording. The source material shows a military exercise in Hawaii.
We found the longer version on the website of the U.S. Department of Defense. It says the footage was filmed by Demitrius Williamson at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on July 12, 2022.
According to its description, the ship in the video is the decommissioned ex-USS Rodney M. Davis (FFG 60). Military forces from Australia, Canada, Malaysia, and the U.S. participated in this exercise.
An archived version of the same website captured on July 16, 2022, already includes this video. Therefore, it has nothing to do with the claims made by Houthis about attacking another ship in the Red Sea last year or earlier this year.
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