Fact Check: Two Clips Showing People Carrying Wounded Boy In Gaza Do NOT Prove Scenes Came From Different Staged Events

Fact Check

  • by: Uliana Malashenko
Fact Check: Two Clips Showing People Carrying Wounded Boy In Gaza Do NOT Prove Scenes Came From Different Staged Events Same Source

Do two clips of the same adults carrying a wounded boy in Gaza prove that the scene was staged in different locations? No, that's not true: The clips on social media come from a single video that depicts the response to a single event in Gaza -- a blast near a medical facility. Lead Stories confirmed that the clips came from this single video and not from "different locations," as was claimed on social media.

The claim about the footage appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 14, 2024. Its caption said:

Same child, same cameraman, same actors, same scene. Different location.

The line that appeared at the bottom of the shared clip read:

Gazawood.

This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:

Screenshot 2024-10-18 at 10.28.14 AM.png

(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Oct 18 14:28:14 2024 UTC)

Aside from the words "same actors, same scene" in the caption, the use of the word "Gazawood," a combination of "Gaza" and "Hollywood," implied that the footage had been staged.

Both clips in the sequence showed a white watermark in Arabic, which translated into English via Google Lens, was a name, allaa_salamah. By searching for the Arabic watermark on Instagram, Lead Stories found an account with that same name that had posted a longer version of the same footage (archived here) on May 8, 2024.

In it, running adults carry several injured children down a street. The footage next shows scenes from an ambulance and, then, apparent medical professionals treating children.

The text that appeared below the video on Instagram in Arabic read, as translated by Google:

25 injured people arrive at Kuwait Specialized Hospital after the occupation artillery fired its shells at a number of citizens' homes in central Rafah.

Screenshot 2024-10-18 at 12.44.00 PM.png

(Source: Google screenshot taken on Fri Oct 18 16:43:46 2024 UTC)

The medical facility's name is a slightly mistranslated reference to Kuwait Specialty Hospital in Rafah, as seen on Google Maps (archived here).

As seen above, the opening shot in the video on Instagram corresponds with the start of the left-hand clip on X.

About six seconds into the video, the start of the right-hand clip on X can be seen, as shown in the screenshot below:

clip 2.png

(Instagram screenshot taken on Wed Oct 23 at 00:30:00 2024 UTC)

Lead Stories was able to confirm that the video was recorded near the Kuwait Specialty Hospital.

The white-sided building with a gray concrete foundation from the clips and video appeared in other images that showed the Kuwait Specialty Hospital's surroundings. Some of those still images can be seen here (archived here) and here (archived here).

After the frame seen in the screenshot from Instagram above, the camera rotated to film the same group continuing down the street. The same footage can be seen at approximately the 15-second mark in the left-hand clip on X. There is no suggestion that the footage here was shot in two different locations:

Screenshot 2024-10-22 at 3.55.56 PM.png

(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Oct 22 19:55:56 2024 UTC)

As the same group re-entered the frame in the footage on Instagram, the same blue wall seen in the right-hand clip on X at approximately the 25-second mark can be seen. The exact same building with a characteristic dark-brown top, visible at about the 26-second mark in the left-hand clip on X, appears next. The only difference is that, this time, it is shot from a greater distance.

Here is the sequence:

Screenshot 2024-10-22 at 4.16.03 PM.png

(Source: Instagram screenshots taken on Tue Oct 22 20:17:45 2024 UTC)

The depicted scene corresponds with news reports about an attack near the Kuwait Specialty Hospital.

On May 8, 2024, one of Al Jazeera's accounts on X cited (archived here) a network correspondent who reported "shelling in the vicinity of the Kuwaiti hospital," as translated by Google.

On the same day, a CNN story (archived here) cited CNN footage showing people arriving at the hospital. A screenshot of it seen here (archived here) shows the same logo of the hospital as what appears on Google Earth:

Screenshot 2024-10-22 at 9.17.49 PM.png

(Source: Google Earth screenshot taken on Tue Oct 22 00:26:49 2024 UTC)

The same logo is also captured in another video on Instagram that depicts the same scene. It was also posted by the allaa_salamah account on May 8, 2024, the same day the account posted the longer footage of adults in Gaza carrying wounded children:

Screenshot 2024-10-22 at 8.21.13 PM.png

(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Oct 22 00:21:13 2024 UTC)

On May 9, 2024, the hospital wrote (archived here) on Instagram, according to a translation by Google Translate, that within the previous 24 hours, 10 dead and 72 injured people had arrived there, which is consistent with the description of the scene captured one day before.

Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims about the Hamas-Israel war can be found here.

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  Uliana Malashenko

Uliana Malashenko joined Lead Stories as a freelance fact checking reporter in March 2022. Since then, she has investigated viral claims about U.S. elections and international conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, among many other things. Before Lead Stories she spent over a decade working in broadcast and digital journalism, specializing in covering breaking news and politics. She is based in New York.

Read more about or contact Uliana Malashenko

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