Claim: An Israeli writer and government advisor claimed a hospitalised Palestinian man is acting and faking his injuries as he was exposed after he posted a video of himself appearing perfectly healthy a few days later
Fact: The claim links two unrelated videos, filmed at different times and places. Most importantly, the hospitalised man in the first video is not the same as the healthy man in the second video.
Israeli activist, writer, and government advisor, Hananya Naftali published a video on X (archive) on 26 October 2023 accusing a Palestinian blogger of faking his injuries from an Israeli bombing.
The video compares two scenes, purportedly of the same man, taken a day apart. In the first scene, labelled “Today,” he walks through a debris-filled area and talks to the camera. In the second scene, labelled “Yesterday,” he lies on a hospital bed with bandages, surrounded by two other people.
The tweet implies that the Palestinian man faked his injuries as Naftali sarcastically claims in the caption that the blogger was “miraculously” healed in one day, calling such Palestinian propaganda a comedy.
Fact or Fiction?
Naftali’s post claims that the men seen in the footage on the right and left are the same person and that his injury was a pretence to discredit Israel, and gain sympathy for the Palestinian people during the ongoing war in Gaza. . However, this is not true. The two clips are from different sources and contexts and show two different individuals.
The man in the clip on the left is Saleh Aljafarawi, a 25-year-old Palestinian activist and singer from Gaza who has been sharing videos on his Instagram account @saleh_aljafarawi, to show the scenario on ground from the ongoing war in Gaza.
The clip on the right shows a man on a hospital bed with bandages, but he is not Aljafarawi. The video was first posted to TikTok on 18 August 2023. As is evident in the hashtag “#Nur_Shams_Camp” (translated), the video is not related to the current conflict in Gaza, but rather to an incident from July 2023 at the Nur Shams camp, a Palestinian refugee camp in the Tulkarm Governorate in the West Bank.
According to a news report published by Palestinian site, International Solidarity Movement, the injured man in the video is a 16-year-old boy, Mohammed Zendiq, who lost his right leg in a raid by Israeli forces at the Nur Shams refugee camp on 24 July 2023. The violent raid was covered by Al Jazeera, Times of Israel, and others.
The video of the injured boy at the hospital was posted online in August 2023, well before the latest escalation of violence in October 2023. Although they bear a resemblance, it is clear these two men are not the same person. Therefore, the video by Hananya Naftali falsely conflates two different episodes of violence from the region, and wrongly claims that the men in the two videos share the same identity.
Reference to “Pallywood” in the post
Naftali’s post suggests that the victim in the video is part of a staged propaganda campaign to discredit Israel, referred to as, “Pallywood propaganda”.
Naftali believes that some Palestinians are “crisis actors” who pretend to be victims of Israeli violence for political purposes. This theory refers to such propaganda material as “Pallywood”, a portmanteau of “Palestine” and “Hollywood”.
Proponents of this theory accuse Palestinians of fabricating or exaggerating incidents of suffering to gain sympathy from the international community. However, there is no evidence to support this theory, and it has been debunked and criticised for its bias against Palestinians.
Virality
The video has been viewed more than 1.7 million times, liked more than 10,000 times, shared more than 3,000 times and has received more than 4,000 comments, mostly to express outrage or disbelief at the alleged deception of the Palestinians.
The video has also been posted on other platforms, such as on Instagram here and on Facebook here, here, here, here, here and here.
Conclusion: Two unrelated clips, filmed in different years and places were merged to make the false claim a victim was a crisis actor. In fact, the healthy man in the first clip is not the same as the injured man in the second clip.
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