| schema:text
| - Misleading: These dated videos do not show ‘staged’ deaths in Gaza
Social media is rife with false and misleading claims about ‘fake casualties’ in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
Annie Lab looked into two video clips that purportedly show fake dead bodies. Some internet users say the death was staged because the bodies blink and move.
Both were shared widely from late October to early November, gathering tens of thousands of engagements.
Misleading: This video was shot in a mosque inside a Malaysian community college
A video posted on X earlier last month shows what appears to be a dozen dead bodies wrapped in white cloth. It features a scene where a supposedly dead man blinks.
The video’s overlaying text in Farsi, and also the tweet in English, imply people in the video are Palestinians pretending to have been killed by Israeli attacks.
Some users reacting to the same video posted by another account also mentioned Hamas and Palestinians.
However, this video has nothing to do with the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
The earliest version of the video we found was on TikTok, and it was uploaded in August this year, two months before the war broke out.
From the visual clues, we discovered that the mosque shown in the video is in Pahang, Malaysia.
A series of photos posted on the Facebook page of the IKM Tan Sri Yahaya Ahmad Pekan Pahang Community College show similar interior features found in the X video, including the floor carpet, wall art, placement of the TV, and the overall layout of the room.
The Darul Ulum Mosque, or Masjid Darul Ulum in Malay, is used as a venue for prayers and seminars, according to the college’s Facebook posts.
Some X users also suggested that the video actually shows a college course about Muslim funerals (for example, here and here).
According to the National Library Board of Singapore, in the Malay Muslim funeral, the deceased will be wrapped in plain white cloth at one point.
Annie Lab has reached out to the college, but we have not received a response at the time of writing.
The claim was also checked by Malaysian media outlets Kosmo and Malaysiakini.
Misleading: This video shows protesting Egyptian students, not ‘Hamas actors’
A user on X made a similar claim about Hamas faking dead Palestinians in late October with a video showing several ‘corpses’ wrapped in white fabric. Like the video filmed in Malaysia, one of the bodies appears to move in this clip.
This video was circulated in various languages. One X user shared the video in Hindi, falsely claiming it was filmed by Al-Jazeera. Three posts on Chinese social media platforms (here, here, and here) featuring the video had the same description.
Annie Lab also discovered that in 2021, this video was posted on BitChute, with a claim that the staged act was made in India to “instill fear” during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, all these claims are misleading.
Through reverse image search, we found the original video on YouTube posted more than ten years ago, in October 2013, by Egyptian news outlet El Badil.
According to some news reports, thousands of students from Egypt’s al-Azhar University staged the demonstration as a protest against the military-backed government that came into power after the forceful removal of President Mohamed Mursi.
This video was also fact-checked by the Associated Press, Newschecker, and Factly.
|
![[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)