[FACT OR FAKE #65] Is This Video Showing A "Child Firing A Missile On Gaza Beach" Fake?
A video, in which a child fires a rocket-propelled grenade into the sea, has been shared more than 15,000 times on Facebook, frequently with captions condemning Palestinians.
By Sadho Ram — 03 Aug 2014, 03:14 PM — Updated over 10 years ago
On 27 July 2014, a viral video found its way to YouTube. It was uploaded with a title that said: "Palestinian child firing an RPG on Gaza Beach July 2014", with an anti-Gaza description.
It was then picked up by several Israeli war crimes' apologists, who tweeted and shared it on Facebook, spreading it further
On Facebook, the video has been shared for over 15,000 times, with comments condemning Palestinians
Screenshot taken from Facebook user "שוקי שינפלד" who uploaded the video on their profile.
Image via SAYS.comThen on 28 July, the UK Mirror reposted the video on their website and tagged it under Gaza and Middle East. In the story, it said:
"One Youtube source says it is a random beach in Lebanon. Another claims it is a Palestinian child in Gaza. Wherever in the world this happened, it was wrong."
mirror.co.ukOn the same day, the New York Daily News also uploaded the video on their website and clearly stating that the video is from Libya
Last week on Saturday, 26 July 2014, a video was uploaded on a UK-based video sharing website called LiveLeak titled "Kid fires RPG on a beach", with a description that said it may have been in Libya
The video shows two (highly irresponsible) men on a beach loading up a rocket-propelled grenade into a launcher held by a young boy. The boy then fires the RPG into the sea. It is the same video that was uploaded on YouTube on 27 July 2014 with an altered headline.
Rana Baker, who is from Gaza and a blogger for a news site called Electronic Intifada, said the landscape and architecture viewable in the background did not look like Gaza
"We do not have houses like this on the beach. We do have tents for families to enjoy summers, but not concrete."
According to Uri Horesh, a lecturer in Arabic, and language coordinator at Northwestern University, Illinois:
“based on a few pronunciation cues and also the architecture on the beach, my colleague and I are of the opinion that Libya makes more sense than Lebanon or any other hypothesis.”
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And according to Maha Rezeq, a Palestinian journalist based in London, who grew up in Libya:
“It’s Libya. The Arabic dialect is clearly Libyan. Plus, the shore and houses are 100 percent Libyan.”
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An academic associate of Uri Horesh has traced the origins of the video to an Arabic Facebook posting dated 24 July, which states the video was filmed in Sirte, Libya. Horesh's contact says "lots of the comments in Arabic (rightly) find what's happening to the kid gross."
FAKE: The video actually dates from before the current conflict and was filmed in Libya. As per multiple language experts and journalists, the accents and architecture in the film correspond to North Africa, not the Middle East.
A propaganda theme common with Israeli spokespeople is that Palestinians in Gaza are responsible for their own children’s deaths, since they are used as “human shields” by armed Palestinian groups. This calumny is used to justify the high death toll in Gaza, the vast majority of them civilians. According to the UN, at least 226 of these were children.
In a Tweet to the Electronic Intifada, BBC Trending journalist Ravin Sampat said he has found traces of the Libyan original going back as far as January. SEE:
