LONDON: Images and videos showing Israeli attacks on Palestinians are being mislabelled and captioned as Russian attacks on Ukrainians by some social media users.
A blurry video claiming to show a Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier has generated 12.7 million views on TikTok and over 1 million views on Twitter.
But the video actually depicts Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, aged 11 at the time, confronting an Israeli soldier after her older brother was arrested in 2012.
(Source: TikTok)
Other images include an Israeli attack on Gaza. One missile strike that took place in 2018 and killed three Palestinians was posted on social media with the caption: “The war started in Ukraine.”
Another image of an airstrike that targeted Gaza in May 2021, killing over 260 Palestinians, was circulated on social media claiming to be a Russian airstrike on Ukraine.
(Source: Instagram)
Many have noted the inconsistency in the international community’s response to images falsely represented as attacks against Ukrainians in comparison with those posted accurately as Israeli attacks on Palestinians.
The phenomenon is not isolated to Palestine, however. Among other images spreading quickly are videos of previous conflicts captioned to suggest they were taken following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Images and clips circulated on Thursday from the supposed destruction of a residential building in Chuhuiv, in eastern Ukraine, are actually from a 2018 gas explosion in the Russian city of Magnitogorsk.
