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This week, the news cycle has been heavily dominated by information around the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.

With information, comes misinformation and disinformation. BOOM’s fact-checking team is working round the clock to verify images, videos and narratives that are viral on the internet.

It is pertinent to note that most of the social media posts sharing false information are still up on different platforms, hours and days after being fact-checked.

Some of these viral posts have been shared by verified Indian handles leading to a massive disinformation campaign on X.

Exhibit 1

Claim: This video of parachutists shows footage of Hamas militants paragliding into Israel during the latest escalation of the conflict between the two.

Fact: The footage shows a training exercise conducted by the Egyptian army in a sports complex.

🔍 Tools/ Techniques used:

• Observed the video carefully and noticed a watermark of a TikTok user named @eslamre1.

• The user had uploaded a similar video on 28 September 2023. The video labelled 'Part 2' was captioned with hashtags -Egyptian Umbrellas, Al Nasser Club on TikTok.

• Upon closely observing the viral video, we saw the text El Nasr SC written on one of the T-shirts worn by a man.

• El Nasr SC is a sporting club based in Cairo, Egypt. BOOM’s Swasti Chatterjee reached out to El Nasr SC on Facebook and the club confirmed that the video was shot in their sporting complex and was part of a training by the Egyptian Army.

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Exhibit 2

Claim: This video shows Israeli retaliatory airstrikes in Gaza.

Fact: This video shows fireworks lighting up the night sky in Algiers, Algeria during a celebration by football fans.

🔍 Tools/ Techniques used:

• We found several X replies hinting that the video is from Algeria of football fans celebrating with fireworks.

• Taking a clue from this, we then searched and found several similar videos of fans of MC Alger and CR Belouizdad football clubs celebrating with bright red fireworks at night.

• The same video was posted on TikTok by an account Rami Ramos on 28 September 2023, long before the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas began on 7 October 2023.

• Using Google Maps, BOOM’s Sujith & Anmol Alphonso were able to geo-locate the viral video to Algiers, Algeria and found that the video was shot in Sidi M'Hamed municipality in Algiers Province, Algeria.

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Exhibit 3

Claim: This video shows Palestinians staging a scene using child actors to show Israeli soldiers killing children.

Fact: BOOM’s Anmol Alphonso found that the viral video is from the Palestinian short film 'Empty Place' which is based on the story of imprisoned Palestinian Ahmed Manasra.

🔍 Tools/ Techniques used:

• A Tik Tok user name (@Mohamad awawdeh) is visible in the video.

• We found that the account had posted the video in 2022 with an Arabic caption that translated to, "Filming a short film about the story of the child prisoner Ahmed Manasra".

• We also found the short film on Manasra which was uploaded on YouTube on 14 April 2022 with the title, "Empty place Film".

• At the 01:23 minute timestamp, we could see the same scene that is being shot by the movie crew with the same boy in the viral video.

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Exhibit 4

Claim: This photo shows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son joining military service amid a raging conflict between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Fact: BOOM found that the photo was clicked in 2014 when Israeli PM’s younger son Avner Netanyahu started his three-year mandatory army service in the Israel Defense Forces.

🔍 Tools/ Techniques used:

• BOOM’s Srijit Das ran a reverse image search on the picture and found several Israel-based news reports from 1 December 2014, carrying the same photograph.

• The Times of Israel published the picture with a caption saying, "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, seen with their son Avner, at Jerusalem's Ammunition Hill on December 01, 2014."

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Exhibit 5

Claim: This video of helicopters being shot down by missiles shows Hamas militants shooting down Israeli helicopters.

Fact: The video has been taken from the video game Arma 3, and is not a real representation of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.

🔍 Tools/ Techniques used:

• BOOM’s Archis Chowdhury found many users responding to some of the posts with the counterclaim that the video is from a video game called Arma 3.

• We ran a few keyframes from the video through reverse image search, which led us to the exact same video being shared by a user on YouTube, on 4 October 2023 - four days before the start of the conflict.

• We looked through the YouTube channel of the user who had shared the video on YouTube, and found that the account routinely shares clips from Arma 3.

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🔗 You can read all our fact-checks related to the conflict on BOOM’s thread on X here.

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Verified By Boom is written by Divya Chandra, edited by Adrija Bose

and designed by H Shiva Roy Chowdhury.

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