The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the ongoing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians that began in the mid-20th century amidst the greater Arab–Israeli conflict.
On 6th May 2021, clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli police began over a planned Supreme Court of Israel decision regarding evictions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood of East Jerusalem. The worst fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in seven years intensified on Tuesday night, as Israeli airstrikes began targeting Hamas offices in Gaza City and militants in Gaza fired rockets at the metropolis of Tel Aviv, the southern city of Ashkelon and Israel’s main airport.
In Gaza, at least 35 Palestinians, including 10 children, had been killed by Tuesday night, and 203 others were wounded, according to health officials. In Israel, five people were killed in strikes on Tel Aviv, Ashkelon and Lod, and at least 100 were wounded, according to medical officials.
Meanwhile, in the middle of mayhem, a 2020 video has made its way to many, in which youngsters are seen fleeing in a mock funeral. The video shows visuals of a few people carrying a body for a funeral; moments later when alarm sirens can be heard in the background the men carrying the body flee, even the man who was pretending to be deceased gets up from the stretcher that was carrying him and flees.
Several Twitter users are falsely linking the viral clip to Gaza with claims that Palestinians pretended to carry a funeral for ‘international sympathy’. A Twitter user ‘@Morelharar1’ had shared the video which garnered over a lakh views at the time of publishing the article. Twitter user Pramod Kumar Singh quote-tweeted Mor Elharar’s tweet and wrote: “Truth has an uncanny knack of coming out. Their propaganda went kaput the moment siren blew. Palestinians acting as if they were carrying a body, ran to safety. Watch till the end to find, the corpse coming alive & running for his life. Where are Pulitzer Prizes winners?” Several users, including Dan Poraz, Policy Advisor to Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Gabi Ashkenazi, shared the video on Twitter with a similar claim.
The viral video was fragmented into multiple key-frames using InVid Google Chrome extension, and then a reverse image search was conducted on each of them on Yandex, this led to a YouTube link which suggests that the video is old and from Jordan. Also, a Twitter thread shared by an account called Palestine Liberation Organisation Department of Public Diplomacy and Policy led to the same YouTube link which had uploaded the video on 26 March 2020. The caption along with the video read: ‘fake funeral in Jordan to break the coronavirus curfew.’
According to a news report by Arabic news website Youm7, young Jordanians devised a trick to get out of their homes during the strict Coronavirus lockdown in 2020. They decided to conduct a mock funeral and put one of their friends in it as if he was the deceased. But as soon as they heard sires and the police approaching them, they left the funeral and fled. Even the young man, who represented the deceased rose to join them, before his arrest. The same video was also uploaded by Abu-Dhabi based news portal 24.ae.
In March 2020, several social media users had also shared the same video as an incident from Jordan. Thus, it could be clearly ascertained the viral clip is not from the recent ongoing clashes between Palestine and Israel.
