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| - Fact Check: No, this photo doesn't show dead bodies of Jerusalem synagogue shooting victims
Following recent incidents of gun violence, a photo has been making the rounds on social media that allegedly shows the dead bodies of the victims of the synagogue shooting wrapped in white cloth.
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India Today Fact Check
This photo is old and has been on the internet since as early as April 30, 2021. It was carried by news reports on a stampede in northern Israel that led to 45 deaths.
On January 27, a Palestinian gunman opened fire outside a Jerusalem synagogue, killing seven people, including a 70-year-old woman, and wounding three others before he was shot and killed by the police. The following day, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy reportedly opened fire in Jerusalem, wounding an Israeli man and his son. Two passers-by shot the boy, who was later taken to the hospital by the police.
Following these grisly incidents of gun violence, several photos and videos of the attacks were shared on social media. Among them was a photo that allegedly showed the dead bodies of the victims of the synagogue shooting wrapped in white cloth.
This photo was also tweeted by Israeli author Hananya Naftali and Rajan Kumar Jha, an OpIndia journalist. Naftali’s post was also retweeted by ANI’s editor-in-chief Smita Prakash. The archived versions of similar posts can be seen here, here and here.
AFWA, however, found that the viral photo is more than a year old, and is not related to the recent gun violence in Jerusalem.
AFWA PROBE
With the help of a reverse search, we found the same photo in multiple social media posts from April 2021. Per these posts, the photo showed victims of a stampede during a Jewish religious festival in Israel’s Mount Meron.
We also found the same image used by a few media outlets around the same time. According to the reports, at least 44 people were killed and more than 100 were injured in a stampede at the Lag B'Omer Jewish festival on Mount Meron in northern Israel on April 30, 2021.
Multiple media organisations including the BBC, The New York Times and Al Jazeera reported at the time that the incident that was considered as Israel's worst civilian disaster. None of these reports, however, contained the viral photo.
Per Al Jazeera, tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews thronged to the Galilee hillside tomb of second-century sage Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai on April 30, 2021, for the annual festival. During the ceremony, part of the crowd surged into a narrow tunnel and consequently, 45 men and boys were either asphyxiated or trampled to death.
According to the Times, initial reports indicated that a grandstand had collapsed. Later, however, it appeared that the stampede had occurred after celebrants slipped on stone steps leading into a narrow passageway with a metal-floored slope.
While the photo appeared consistent with other photos from the stampede site as published by international media organisations, we were unable to independently verify if the photo showed victims of the tragic incident. However, it is clear that this photo is in no way related to the recent shooting incidents in Jerusalem.
(With inputs from Ashish Kumar)
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