Months after his release from hospital after having his right leg amputated, Mohammed Zendiq discovered that his photo was circulating on social networks, victim of the wave of disinformation that has prevailed since the outbreak of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas.
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This 16-year-old Palestinian was drawn against his will into a communications battle in which each side tries, often with distorted photos, to demonize the other or win the empathy of internet users.
An old video showing Mohammed Zendiq injured in a hospital bed has been widely published and portrayed as that of a Palestinian blogger reporting on the Israeli bombing of Gaza.
Publications even claimed that the blogger staged his injuries, as other pictures shortly afterward allegedly showed him uninjured.
A Palestinian blogger was “miraculously” healed from an “Israeli bombing” within a day, an Israeli influencer wrote in a message on X (formerly Twitter) that was viewed millions of times.
They were not the same people, as AFP fact-checkers proved using reverse image and keyword searches.
One photo showed Mohammed Zendiq, who his family said lost his leg in an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank in July. The other was from an independent video blogger from Gaza named Saleh Aljafarawi.
This manipulation brought the young amputee a barrage of hateful comments. “I fear for my son’s life,” his father Yousef Issam Fandqah, 50, told AFP. “He could be killed for that lie.”
“Pallywood”
Falsely accusing people of faking their suffering has become “one of the most predictable disinformation tactics” in a crisis, says Mike Caulfield, who studies fake news online at the university’s Center for an Informed Public of Washington.
These stories have multiplied with the war between Israel and Hamas. Some of the most viral posts targeting war-affected Gazans have used the term “Pallywood,” a derogatory term that mixes “Palestine” and “Hollywood.”
“This trend arose in the early days of the war, when a video revealed the so-called ‘behind the scenes’ of a film set and claimed that Palestinians were making wounds there,” said Yotam Frost of the Israeli disinformation monitoring organization FakeReporter.
False narratives are also being invented to defame Israelis, he says.
AFP fact-checkers have rejected numerous claims that photos were attached and were misused because they were taken at different times and locations.
Official Israeli reports on X, including embassies, falsely claimed that a video of a dead Palestinian child actually showed nothing more than a doll wrapped in cloth. Other reports incorrectly presented footage from a 2013 protest in Egypt and a funeral preparation class in Malaysia in which Palestinians staged their own deaths.
“Dehumanizing”
“It’s a series of recipes: find a few photos of people who look similar, or watch videos and find something that you can pretend a war is staged,” Mr. Caulfield points out.
These stories “often take the worst moment in a parent or partner’s life – the loss of a loved one – and turn it into a circus. It’s cruel and exploitative,” he said.
After more than a month of war, Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip have killed a total of 11,240 people, mostly civilians, including 4,630 children, according to the Hamas Health Ministry.
On the Israeli side, around 1,200 people were killed, according to authorities, the vast majority civilians, killed on October 7, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel, which was of unprecedented scale and violence since Israel’s founding in 1948.
By overshadowing the facts reported by people on the ground, these disinformation strategies polarize public opinion and incite violence.
“If we believe that these deaths are staged, we become more desensitized – or skeptical – about the atrocities of war,” warns Alessandro Accorsi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.
In addition to this “very dehumanizing” aspect, these actions aim to “sow doubt about civilian deaths in general and rally support for more violence and attacks,” he emphasizes.