The conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants continues to escalate. Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, launched the rocket attacks last week, in retaliation for Israeli police clashes with Palestinians near al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, in East Jerusalem. Israeli fighter jets unleashed a series of heavy airstrikes at multiple locations in Gaza City. This came hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled the fourth war with Gaza’s Hamas rulers would rage on. Hamas also pressed on, launching rockets from civilian areas in Gaza toward civilian areas in Israel.
However, a video is being circulated with respect to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, in which one can see children’s faces are coloured with red paint. In the later part of the video it shows their makeup done in such a way that it looks like injuries. This video is being shared with different captions but everyone’s claiming that Palestinian’s are faking injuries to get sympathy from the world and to put Israel in a bad light.
This same video also went viral in 2018, when conspiracy theory erupted that the video is of anti-Bashar Assad activists faking injuries to accuse the Syrian government of committing atrocities. Then, France 24-The Observers had tweeted debunking the conspiracy theory lying around the video. The Observers tweeted, “There’s a new conspiracy theory those pictures of wounded people in #EasternGhouta are just actors wearing makeup.”
On conducting a reverse image search, by breaking the viral video into multiple key frames using the verification tool InVID, led to a longer video report by TRT world, a Turkish state-owned news broadcaster, published on 2nd March 2017.
According to The Observers, the video is of a group of young Palestinians who are interested in make-up and cinema special effects. The original report was published by a Palestinian website The Gaza Post on February 25, 2017. According to The Observers, ‘The members of the group explained they are setting up a company specializing in cinema make-up and special effects and that the company is the first one of its kind in Gaza.’
In the actual video the anchor speaks about Mariam Saleh, a makeup artist working in the Palestinian film industry, who “taught herself to make fake blood for Palestinian films breaking into a business traditionally run by men”.
The report goes on to add that Saleh creates “horrific looking injuries” on actors working on a project by ‘Doctors of the World’, a French charity that aims to raise awareness of the dangers faced by residents of Gaza. Further, at around 16 seconds, one can notice a banner in the background which reads ‘simulation’. Even the jackets of the crew carry the logo of French charity, Médecins du Monde or ‘Doctors of the World’. At 2-minute-and-10-seconds video further had details, and one can notice the jackets of the makeup artists which carried a cartoon graphics that mentioned ‘Special Effect Make-Up’ on the back.
Thus, on comparing the videos published by The Gaza Post and TRT, it can be concluded that they were shot on the same day. The TRT report states that Salah and other artists were working on a project led by the French charity, Doctors of the World. Hence, the ongoing claim is misleading.
