Video claiming to show Hamas faking casualties is a decade old, filmed in Egypt

Since Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, the death toll on both sides has continued to climb.

The Palestinian death toll in the war has surpassed 8,500, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. In the occupied West Bank, more than 120 Palestinians have been killed. More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed, most of them civilians slain when Hamas first attacked.

One video being shared across many social media networks claims to show Hamas faking Palestinian casualties, with people covered with white funeral sheets lined up on the ground. The posts imply that Hamas is using actors to fake casualties as part of a propaganda campaign.

Text on one TikTok video says Palestinians and Hamas are masters of fake news, and on X, several posts claim the video is a result of news organizations Al Jazeera “pre-shooting preparations,” implying the bodies were being staged for the news.

Several people on TikTok asked us to VERIFY what was happening in the video.

THE QUESTION

Does the video show Hamas faking Palestinian deaths in Gaza during the current Israel-Hamas War?

THE SOURCES

• Original video from a 2013 protest in Egypt
• InVid and RevEye, video forensics tools

THE ANSWER

No, the video doesn’t show Hamas faking Palestinian deaths in Gaza during the current Israel-Hamas War. It was filmed a decade ago during a student protest and demonstration in Egypt.

WHAT WE FOUND

This video is a decade old and doesn’t have any connection to the current fighting between Israel and Hamas. Using a reverse image search of still frames taken from the video clip, VERIFY traced the video to a YouTube video originally published on Oct. 28, 2013 by Egyptian newspaper Al-Badil. 

You can tell the videos are the same by comparing the text written in Arabic on the white sheets and the fact that the body that moves at the 16-second mark of the original video matches the 8-second mark of the viral video. The same person can be seen moving in the same way and the shoes match. 

According to Al-Badil’s YouTube caption written in Arabic and translated with Google Translate, the video shows a group of students who were members of the Muslim Brotherhood protesting at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.

The protesters gathered on the campus to show support for Mohamed Morsi, who was elected president in Egypt’s first free election and served from 2012 to 2013. In 2013, Morsi was ousted by the country’s military in a coup, and the military banned Morsi’s party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. According to Reuters and BBC reports from 2013, the pro-Morsi students had been protesting the military coup on the campus for several weeks.

This is not the first time footage from the 2013 Al-Azhar protest in Egypt has been shared out of context in connection with conflict between Israel and Hamas. VERIFY found this screenshot from the 2013 protest video that was posted to X in August 2014. The post says: “Gaza ‘Corpses’ Caught Moving When They Forget Cameras Are On Them.”

In 2018, the full video was posted to X, with this caption: “When you're a dead Palestinian martyr but your nose keeps itching.” 

This story is also available in Spanish / Lee este artículo también en español: Video que dice mostrar a Hamas falsificando víctimas tiene una década de antigüedad y fue filmado en Egipto

The Associated Press contributed to this report.