STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.
Does footage on social media show Palestinians celebrating at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem after they heard news of Iran's mid-April 2024 aerial attack on Israel? No, that's not true: The video was shot days before Iran launched drones and missiles against Israel. The video was recorded during the last Friday of Ramadan, according to a BBC reporter. Lead Stories found evidence that this video was filmed on or around April 5, 2024, eight days before Iran launched its aerieal attack on Israel.
The claim appeared in an X, formerly Twitter, post (archived here) posted on April 13, 2024. The caption read:
Palestinians celebrate at Al-Aqsa Mosque after hearing the news of Iran's attack on Israel
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Apr 15 13:31:58 2024 UTC)
A Google reverse image search of a frame from this video led to an Instagram post with the same video. (archived here). The date on the Instagram post is April 5, 2024, eight days before the April 13, 2024, Iranian attacks by air on Israel. The caption, translated by an in-house translation, reads: "We heed your call Al Aqsa. It means we will defend you and be there for you #Jerusalem #standingup #mayGodbeyourlifeandhelper." The Al-Aqsa Mosque is located in Jerusalem.
One similarity seen in the video from Instagram and the video from X is the man walking from the left side of the screen to the right and out of frame, speaking into a smart phone. Evidence of that is below:
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Mon Apr 15 15:00:28 2024 UTC)
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Apr 15 11:11:00 2024 UTC)
Searching on X for "Al-Aqsa mosque until:2024-04-15 since:2024-04-01" (archived here) showed an X post from Shayan Sardarizadeh, a journalist for BBC Verify. Sardarizadeh also debunked this claim (archived here) with a screenshot of a YouTube short (archived here) featuring the Al-Aqsa Mosque. His caption read:
This video, viewed nearly 400,000 times, falsely claims to show Palestinians at Al-Aqsa mosque celebrate Iranian retaliatory strikes against Israel tonight. This video is from last week, and shows Palestinians praying at Al-Aqsa on the last Friday of Ramadan.
The video was titled, "6 April 2024," and also features the same man seen in the Instagram and X post walking and speaking into a phone:
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Mon Apr 15 11:37:20 2024 UTC)
More Lead Stories articles on the Iranian attacks on Israel are here.
Updates:
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2024-04-16T13:01:15Z 2024-04-16T13:01:15Z Amended Arabic and Turkish translations.
