November 9, 2024

No, This Video Does Not Show Hamas Militants Using Parachutes To Enter Israel

Quint #Quint

How did we find out?: We noticed a watermark showing a TikTok username ‘@eslamre1’ in the video.

Taking a cue from this, we used a VPN tool to look for the account, since the platform is banned in India.

This led us the account of Eslam Refaat, where we saw three similar videos marked “part 2”, “part 3” and “part 4”, which resembled the video in the claim.

These videos were published in late September this year and one part was geotagged with ‘Masr Al Jadidah’, which is a district in Cairo, Egypt.

We also saw a person wearing a jacket with the words ‘El Nasr SC’ on the back. Combining this with Egypt as a search term, we found that it represented El Nasr Sporting Club, a Cairo-based football club.

A search for the club on Google Maps showed us a football stadium, which is where the video from the claim was shot.

To see whether the user had deleted the video seen in the claim, we looked for them on web archiving websites.

This led us to an archived version of the user’s account, which showed that the video was present on their account earlier.

(Swipe to view both images.)

We also came across another archive, which showed that the user had uploaded a second video to clarify that the video was not from Palestine.

Conclusion: A video from Cairo, Egypt, which predates the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, is being falsely linked to the war.

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