Does a viral video on the X platform prove that "the Kamal Hospital in the Gaza Strip" was attacked by the Israeli forces "with a bulldozer" in 2023? No, that's not true: The footage predates the conflict. It is a least a decade old, and was posted as news coverage of an incident in Egypt.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on December 17, 2023. It began:
IDF attacks hospital patients with bulldozers.
The post continued:
The Israeli army has attacked the patients on the beds of the Kamal Hospital in the Gaza Strip with a bulldozer.
This is what it looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Dec 19 20:36:39 2023 UTC)
The post referred to the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. On December 17, 2023, it was raided (archived here) by Israeli forces, according to news reports and the United Nations.
Video with the post included 29 seconds of low-quality, pixelated footage. It captured what appeared to be a red vehicle smashing some structures in a crowded area.
At the 0:03 mark, a visible logo appeared in the top left corner of the frame:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Dec 19 20:47:37 2023 UTC)
Tasnim is an Iran-based news agency. According to its website (archived here), it places "defending the Islamic Revolution against negative media propaganda campaign" on top of its agenda.
Since 2013, the outlet has been publishing articles in English, too.
A broad search for the word "bulldozer" in English across the Tasnim website returned four stories, but none of them was published in 2023. None of them included the same footage, either.
A reverse image search shows that the video from X had been published on YouTube (archived here) by Al Jazeera's Arabic Service on August 26, 2013, more than a decade before the 2023 Hamas-Israel war:
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Tue Dec 19 21:00:08 2023 UTC; the page was automatically translated to English by Chrome)
This version of the video was 18 seconds longer. It revealed that a red vehicle had a visible Coca-Cola logo on it and that it crashed into a blue tent surrounded by the crowd. The sound captured inaudible human screaming, as the camera moved to a young man who appeared to have been injured. Heavy smoke and fire were seen in the background.
Al Jazeera's caption made no mention of Gaza or Israel.
Instead, it referred to the Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in in Egypt (archived here), which resulted in a massacre on August 14, 2013.
The account that published the claim on X was started in December 2022. As of this writing, it contained a request to donate money via PayPal:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Dec 19 21:53:03 2023 UTC)
The nickname of the PayPal account contained the same word, "Sprinter." But that was paired with a different combination of digits compared to what was seen in the name of the account on X: 99880.
That matched the PayPal used by another account on X, also utilizing the word "Sprinter" and that combination of digits in its handle. That account has spread false claims in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war in the past, which was debunked by Lead Stories, for example, here. Another account on X, this time using this exact combination in its handle -- Sprinter99880 -- posted misleading information about Ukraine too.
Other Lead Stories fact checks about the 2023 Hamas-Israel war can be found here.
