Are the heads of vaccinated people exploding and combusting when the 5G signal in Israel is turned up? No, that's not true: These video clips are real, but the headline is baseless as the video clips have nothing to do with Israel, COVID-19 vaccines or 5G. The first two graphic clips show 2019 footage of Iraqi protestors who were killed by tear gas grenades that had been fired directly at them. The last video clip shows the aftermath of a 2021 flooding incident in Zhengzhou City in China that resulted in the deaths of 14 people who were trapped in a flooded subway.
The article (archived here) with an embedded video was published by Before It's News on September 4, 2023, under the title "Vaxgenocide: It Can Happen Anywhere - Vaxed People's Heads Are Exploding & Combusting With the Turning up of 5G in Israel - Harris Unveils Plans to Combat Climate Change: 'Reduce..." The final portion of the headline is not relevant to this fact check. The article contains only captioned videos, the first video's caption reads:
VAXED PEOPLES HEADS EXPLODING & COMBUSTING UPON THE TURNING UP OF 5G IN ISRAEL!
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: Beforeitsnews.com screenshot taken on Wed Sep 06 20:11:10 2023 UTC)
The article contains several additional embedded videos on a variety of topics outside the scope of this fact check.
This fact check will only address the three clips that together make up the first video, which is 34 seconds long. The image quality of this video is grainy, and all three videos are graphic, showing dead and dying people. Lead Stories was able to identify the sources of these clips by using screenshots from the video and searching with the Google, Yandex and TinEye reverse image search engines.
The first two clips show two different events in Iraq during the protests in late October 2019. There were many incidents where protestors were fired upon with military-grade 40 mm tear gas grenades (pictured below) that weigh up to 10 times more than a standard tear gas canister. These grenades were not deployed in the typical fashion, which would be to use tear gas to disperse a crowd.
(Source: Amnesty International YouTube video screenshot taken on Wed Sep 06 22:22:31 2023 UTC)
These deaths were investigated by Amnesty International. Lynn Maalouf, then the Middle East research director at Amnesty International, was quoted in an Amnesty International report:
All the evidence points to Iraqi security forces deploying these military-grade grenades against protesters in Baghdad, apparently aiming for their heads or bodies at point-blank range. This has had devastating results, in multiple cases piercing the victims' skulls, resulting in gruesome wounds and death after the grenades embed inside their heads.
An NBC News video posted on YouTube on November 18, 2019, focuses on the investigation into the use of these battlefield weapons against protesting civilians. It uses the bare minimum of the graphic bystander footage to illustrate the situation. The scene in the first clip appears at the 2:07 mark in the NBC segment. The scene appearing at 10 seconds in the Before It's News video appears seconds later, for a moment at 2:09 in the NBC segment.
The last clip, appearing 20 seconds into the Before It's News video, shows the aftermath of a flooding disaster that happened in Zhengzhou, China, on July 20, 2021. A report on the incident, "Metro System Inundation in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China," was published in the journal Sustainability on July 29, 2022 (archived here). Included in this report is a photo of the subway station. Some bodies are on the platform, and some people are standing and sitting nearby. This image matches some details in the video, including the white strap or firehose running along the platform, and the unique hexagon-shaped lights at that station that show in the reflections of the puddles in the video. Clearer copies of both the graphic photo and video were posted on Twitter (now X) on July 20 and 22, 2021 respectively. This flooding did not only impact one subway station but was widespread above ground in the city. The caption posted with the video on Twitter reads:
Citizen video evidence and questions why CCP doctors rushed to remove cornea of flood victims instead of saving them from yesterday's flood.
Organ Harvesting in real time
Lead Stories was not able to verify if the video shows "organ harvesting in real time" but it does show the aftermath of the flooding in Zhengzhou, China, on July 20, 2021.
Previous Lead Stories fact checks about Before It's News can be found here.
