False news spreads about war between Israel and Kazakhstan, fearing harm to innocent people
(AFP, Jerusalem, 14th) Months after Palestinian teenager Zandik had his right leg amputated and was discharged from the hospital, he found that his image went viral on the Internet and was used to downplay the brutality of the war between Israel and Hamas. Fake news is being promoted.
Since the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas raided Israel from the Gaza Strip it rules on October 7, triggering Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza, many civilians on both sides have been trapped in a fog of false news, including Mohammed Zendiq, now 16 years old.
In the current information war that parallels deadly fighting on the ground, conspiracy theorists describe ordinary Palestinians and Israelis as “crisis actors,” deliberately pretending to be injured or dead to gain sympathy and demonize their enemies.
An old video of Zendik lying injured in a hospital bed was shared in several social media posts, with the person in the video falsely claiming to be a Palestinian blogger chronicling Israel’s bombing of Gaza.
The posts spread fabricated stories that the blogger faked an injury and was walking around seemingly unscathed shortly after.
An Israeli internet celebrity said in a post on social media platform Walking around the same.” The post attracted millions of views.
However, AFP fact-checkers used image searches and keyword searches to determine that the posts were conflating images of two different people.
One of them is Zendik, who, according to his family, lost his leg in an Israeli raid in the West Bank in July; the other is a man in Gaza who has no relation to Zendik. Video blogger named Saleh Aljafarawi.
But the posts that made up the story went viral, triggering a flood of online abuse against Zandik, with some even saying why doctors didn’t cut off his other leg or kill him. Highlighting the extent to which disinformation during wartime affects the real world.
“I’m afraid my son’s life is in danger. He could be killed because of this lie,” Zandik’s 50-year-old father told AFP.
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2023-11-14 11:50:02
