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| - Misleading: These videos do not show US or Israeli embassy attacked by Hamas supporters
In late October, two videos supposedly depicting protesters attacking U.S. or Israeli embassy in Bahrain and Turkey, respectively, were widely shared globally.
Together, they had thousands of engagements on social media platforms in multiple languages, including English, Chinese, Arabic, German, and Pashto.
Annie Lab investigated the two clips and found that both of them predate the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Also, the buildings in the videos are not embassies.
Misleading: Video shows a 2012 protests in Bahrain
The first video shows protestors throwing Molotov cocktails at a building partially engulfed in fire.
A tweet by a self-proclaimed journalist on X (formerly known as Twitter) claimed protestors in Bahrain were targeting the American Embassy. It was subsequently shared by users on HKGolden Forum — a popular Hong Kong-based online message board.
Three news outlets based in Iraq, Italy, and Tunisia also reported on the same video but with a slightly different claim that protestors were setting fire to the Israeli Embassy in Manama, the capital of Bahrain.
However, the building under attack in the video is neither the embassy of the U.S. nor Israel. It was actually a local police station in Manama, and the video is also at least eleven years old.
Annie Lab found a still frame of the video posted on Nov. 7, 2012, to a Facebook page named “Occupy Bahrain.” The post said the building on fire was a local police station in Sitra Island in Manama.
We adjusted the exposure and saturation of the video on X to show it is nearly identical to this Facebook image (see below).
Bahrain had seen occasional violent demonstrations in 2012, even after the Occupy Bahrain movement, also known as the 2011 Bahraini uprising, subsided a year earlier. The Sitra Police Station had long been a target of attack.
An image of the Sitra police station from 2017 also confirms it is the building in the video.
Google Maps Street View of the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain, on the other hand, does not resemble the building in the video at all.
According to news reports, Bahrain and Israel normalized their diplomatic relationship in 2020. The Israeli Embassy was opened in September this year.
Reuters and Logically have also debunked the video.
Misleading: Video shows election celebrations in Turkey in May
The second video we looked into was posted on X with a claim that Hamas supporters in Turkey attempted to attack the Israeli Consulate-General in Istanbul with fireworks.
A similar message with this video was also shared on Weibo in Chinese, stating, “Palestinians and Turks set off fireworks at the Israeli Embassy in Turkey.”
However, this video has nothing to do with the recent Israel-Hamas war.
Even at first glance, the video appears to show a celebration in Turkey as many people are holding and waving Turkish national flags.
An image search led to an Instagram post of the same video uploaded in May, five months before the current war in Gaza broke out.
The Turkish post said the people in the video were celebrating the re-election of the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Demirören News Agency reported on May 29 that a man holding the fireworks had dropped them in the streets of the Fatih Municipality of Istanbul during the celebration.
The fireworks exploded among the crowd and caused public panic. No injuries were reported.
To make sure, we also located the Consulate General of Israel in the country, which is actually in the Yapi Kredi Plaza in the Beşiktaş Municipality, 10 km north of Fatih Municipality.
The Israeli Embassy, meanwhile, is located in the capital, Ankara, over 300 km from Istanbul.
There have been news reports about demonstrators attacking Israeli embassies in some countries. In mid-October, for example, Reuters reported that rioting protestors clashed with Jordanian police near the Israeli Embassy after a hospital attack in Gaza.
In another instance reported by ABC News on Oct. 21, four suspects were arrested for a small blast near the Israeli Consulate in Nicosia, Cyprus.
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