video False claims and shares continue to flood social media as the Gaza war, triggered by Hamas’ unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack, to which Israel retaliated with a bloody offensive in the Palestinian territory, enters its second year. Recent posts criticizing Israel have been shared repeatedly around the world, along with false claims and graphic videos showing Israeli police strangling Palestinian children. The video that is actually being circulated predates the Israel-Hamas war and contains an incident that occurred in Sweden in 2015.
Warning: graphic video
“An Israeli police officer strangled a Palestinian child while sitting on his body during a protest against the US Embassy in Jerusalem on Saturday. The child suffocated and eventually died,” read part of the Thai caption of the shared video. November 11, 2024 on Facebook.
It shows a man wearing a fluorescent yellow vest holding the boy’s face to the ground.
The boy is shown raising his index finger and reciting the Islamic Shahada creed, which professes belief in Allah and acceptance of Prophet Muhammad as God’s messenger.
Screenshot of a fake Facebook post taken on November 13, 2024.
The post appeared on October 7, 2023, as the war in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’s attack on Israel, intensified, killing 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to AFP’s tally of official Israeli statistics (archived link).
The militants also took 251 hostages to Gaza. Some have already died. Of these, 97 are still held hostage, and 34 have been confirmed dead, but their bodies remain in the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed more than 43,700 people in Gaza, according to figures from the Hamas-run local health ministry. The United Nations considers these figures to be reliable.
video Social media users in Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Australia and Romania also shared similar false claims.
The comments show that many users believed the post.
“I can no longer tolerate what Israel has done to our Palestinian brothers and sisters,” one person wrote.
Another said: “Look at what the most evil Zionist state has done to Palestinian children.”
Since the outbreak of the Gaza war there have been frequent protests in Israel, putting pressure on the government to do more to secure the release of prisoners (archived link).
However, AFP found no official reports of Israeli police killing Palestinian children during protests near the US Embassy in Jerusalem.
Moreover, the video has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was previously circulated as a false claim in 2019 and 2023 before being debunked by the AFP.
Swedish video
A reverse image search on Google using one of the video’s keyframes revealed that it was actually filmed in Sweden.
A high-quality version of this clip was previously posted on YouTube by the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan on February 9, 2015 (archived link).
The title translated into Swedish is: “The security guard slammed the 9-year-old’s head into the ground.”
The same newspaper also reported this incident that day (archive link).
Below is a screenshot comparing the false post (left) with Sydsvenskan’s 2015 YouTube video (right).
Comparison of screenshots of the false post (left) and Sydsvenskan’s YouTube video (right) released in 2015.
An AFP reporter who speaks fluent Swedish analyzed footage of Sydsvenskan and found that bystanders could be heard saying in Swedish: “That child is a child” and “How old is he?”
At the beginning of the video, the security guards were seen wearing fluorescent vests with the Swedish words ‘Ordnings Vakt’, or ‘Public Service Officer’, written on the front and back. This uniform is usually worn by security guards assisting the Swedish police.
Below is a screenshot of a YouTube video containing the words highlighted by AFP.
Screenshot of a YouTube video containing elements highlighted by AFP.
moroccan child
AFP also contacted Jens Mikkelsen, one of the journalists who reported the incident for the Sydsvenskan newspaper (archived link).
Mikkelsen confirmed in an email on November 3, 2023 that the video was from an incident he wrote about and said the incident took place in the Swedish city of Malmo.
“Yes, that’s the boy I wrote several stories about,” Mikkelsen told AFP.
Mikkelsen called the boy Amin and said he was born and raised in extreme poverty in Morocco, leaving home at age 12 to settle in Melilla, a Spanish enclave on Morocco’s northern coast.
“He spent months trying to catch a ferry to Spain every night until he finally succeeded. He traveled by train and bus with friends and then hitchhiked to Sweden,” Mikkelsen said.
Another journalist, Katia Wagner, who has published a book about Amin and other Moroccan boys living on the streets of Stockholm, also reviewed the video (links archived here and here ).
Wagner told AFP in an email on November 6, 2023: “The person in that video is definitely ‘Amin’. I met him when he was in a shelter after the Malmo incident and I stayed in contact with him for a while.”
AFP requested information about the boy from the Swedish Social Services and Immigration Services but did not receive a response.
The incident was also reported by France24 on 11 February 2015, which stated that two private security guards were being investigated by police following the incident (archived link).
According to a report from a news site: local swedenThe two guards were not charged (Archived link).
AFP has repeatedly exposed misinformation related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
