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The video was captured during the Tadamon massacre in Syria on 16 April 2013.
This Facebook post claiming to show a video of the Israeli military shooting civilians in Gaza is FALSE.
“Israeli military are conducting a war crime on the ground operation in Gaza they’re doing exactly what Hitler did to them. Please share it before they take it out of social media as they control the social media. Let It go very viral,” the text accompanying the video reads.
A video attached to the post shows a combat uniformed person leading a handcuffed, blindfolded individual into a pit with people and tires. The handcuffed person is shot twice in the pit. Several other handcuffed, blindfolded individuals are also dropped into the pit and shot dead.
However, does this video show the Israeli military dropping people in a pit and shooting them dead? We checked.
After performing a reverse image search using one of the video’s thumbnails, we came across three websites indicating that the incident happened in Tadamon, near Damascus, during the Syrian Civil War on 16 April 2013.
A Turkish website reported that the massacre was committed by the 227th Unit of military intelligence affiliated with Syrian President Bashar Assad. The website claims the military unit executed 41 civilians in the Tadamon District, south of Damascus.
A YouTube keyword search revealed corroborating reports from The Guardian and DW documenting the video we are fact-checking. The two media outlets concurred with the evidence that the video in question was taken during a massacre that happened in 2013 in Syria. The Guardian identified the officer shooting the civilians as Amjad Yousef.
The Syrian 227th military unit allegedly burned the bodies of those executed. The video emerged in April 2022.
More than a year after being leaked, the video has surfaced with misleading content claiming to cover the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas that ensued on 7 October 2023. PesaCheck previously debunked this claim containing the same video.
PesaCheck has looked into a Facebook post claiming to show a video of the Israeli military allegedly shooting civilians in Gaza and found it to be FALSE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context into posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Naomi Wanjiku and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Cédrick Irakoze.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck managing editor Doreen Wainainah.
