| schema:text
| - Fact Check: This adorable father-daughter clip is not from Palestine!
A 2020 video of a Syrian father and his daughter coping with bombs through laughter was falsely shared in the context of Israel's Gaza offensive.
Listen to Story
India Today Fact Check
This is an old video from 2020, featuring a father-daughter duo from Syria.
Of the hundreds of heart-wrenching videos from Gaza that have flooded social media, one purports to show a Palestinian father and a daughter laughing every time there’s the boom of an explosion is heard. Those sharing the clip claimed that this Palestinian father taught his daughter to laugh every time she heard the sound of an Israeli airstrike.
One person shared the clip on Facebook writing, “A father tells his daughter to laugh every time she hears an Israeli airstrike so that she doesn’t get scared. May Allah ease their pain.” The archived version of a similar post can be found here.
India Today Fact Check found that this is an old video of a Syrian father-daughter duo from 2020.
Our Probe
Reverse searching keyframes of the viral video led us to an Instagram post containing the viral video dated February 18, 2020. The caption in Turkish, loosely translated into English, read: “A Syrian father found a way to protect his daughter from bombs not only physically but also psychologically.”
With the help of this, we found several media reports from February 2020 about the video in question. According to The Guardian, this video featured Abdullah Mohammad and his daughter Salwa, laughing at the sound of shelling in Syria.
Mohammad, who moved his family from Idlib to the Sarmada district in Syria, told his daughter that the noise of bombs was part of a game to try and insulate her from trauma. A photo of the father-daughter duo from Syria was also featured on Getty Images.
We then found an interview of Mohammad on the YouTube channel of Agence France-Presse. In it, he explained that he told his three-year-old daughter that the sound of bombs, like fireworks, was harmless and just for fun.
As per reports, Mohammad was living at a friend’s house near the Syrian-Turkish border in Sarmada, after his family was forced to flee their house during the Syrian civil war.
According to The Independent, this video was tweeted by Mohammad’s friend and journalist Mehmet Algan on February 17, 2020. When the video went viral on social media, the Turkish government helped Mohammad’s family to cross the border on February 25.
As per an Al Jazeera report, dated March 6, 2020, the family went to live with a relative in Antakya, a municipality in Turkey’s southern province of Hatay, after crossing the Bab al-Hawa-Cilvegozu border. The photos of the happy family crossing the border were tweeted by a Syrian photographer at the time.
Thus, it is more than clear that an old video of a Syrian father-daughter duo, who devised a unique game to distract themselves from the bombing, was falsely linked to the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.
Please share it on our at 73 7000 7000
You can also send us an email at factcheck@intoday.com
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)