How a Palestinian became a victim of Hamas propaganda
Months after the amputation of his right leg, images of Mohammed Sendik are flooding the internet. Social media claims that the Palestinian is a victim of the current war between Israel and Hamas. In reality, the 16-year-old is part of a disinformation campaign.
The war between the Islamist Hamas and Israel is also being waged with false information. Mohammed Sendik can report on this from his own experience: The 16-year-old Palestinian, who had his leg amputated months ago, has now discovered a video of himself on the internet in which he was falsely linked to the war. Sendik is one of many victims of the propaganda war on both sides.
Both Palestinians and Israelis are sometimes vilified as "crisis actors" who fake injuries and deaths in order to gain sympathy and demonize the other side. This is what happened to Mohammed Sendik. An old video showing him in hospital after his amputation was presented on the internet as a recording allegedly showing a Palestinian blogger reporting on the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip.
The posts spread the false claim that the blogger had only staged the injuries, but was walking around unharmed shortly afterwards - which another video was supposed to prove. "Palestinian blogger 'miraculously' healed after a day of 'Israeli bombing'," wrote an Israeli influencer in a post on X (formerly Twitter) about the footage that was clicked millions of times. "Yesterday he was still in hospital, today he can walk again as if nothing had happened."
However, images of two different people were mixed together in the posts, as fact-checkers from the AFP news agency discovered. One picture shows Sendik, who, according to his family, lost his leg in July during an Israeli army operation in the occupied West Bank. The other person is the video blogger Saleh Aljafarawi from the Gaza Strip.
The posts with the false claim spread across the internet and Sendik felt the effects. He was insulted in comments on the internet, with some commentators asking why the doctors had not also removed his second leg or killed him. "I fear for my son's life," says Sendik's father Jusef Issam Fandqah. "He could be killed because of this lie."
Fact checkers expose "crisis actors"
Falsely accusing people of staging their suffering has become a common disinformation tactic in crises, says Mike Caulfield, who studies online hoaxes at the University of Washington.
Similar claims were also made after gun attacks in the US and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, with the war between Israel and the radical Islamic Palestinian organization Hamas, there has been a massive increase in the number of such claims, which according to experts is also due to the fact that platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) now monitor content less strictly.
Many posts that play down the suffering of the people in the Gaza Strip talk about "Pallywood" - a derogatory term that combines the concepts of Palestine and Hollywood. "This trend started in the early days of the war with a video showing a behind-the-scenes look at a movie set, claiming that Palestinians were faking injuries," says Yotam Frost of FakeReporter, an Israeli disinformation watchdog.
AFP fact-checkers debunked several claims about alleged "crisis actors", often using old pictures and footage from completely different locations. For example, official Israeli accounts on X, including embassy accounts, falsely claimed that a video of a dead Palestinian child was actually just a doll wrapped in cloth.
Other users put footage of a 2013 protest in Egypt into the current context, and a video of a funeral director training course in Malaysia was misused to claim that Palestinians were just playing dead.
"If you believe these deaths are staged, you become more desensitized"
Hundreds of fighters from Hamas, classified as a terrorist organization by the USA and the EU, invaded Israel on 7 October and committed atrocities, mainly against civilians. According to Israeli reports, around 1,200 people were killed in Israel and around 240 people were taken hostage in the Gaza Strip. Since then, the Israeli military has been massively attacking targets in the Gaza Strip, and ground troops have now also entered the Palestinian territory. According to Hamas, which cannot be independently verified, around 11,240 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip by Monday evening.
Disinformation can further fuel this war. "If you believe that these deaths are staged, you become less sensitive or more skeptical about the atrocities of war," says Alessandro Accorsi of the non-governmental organization International Crisis Group. "It's extremely dehumanizing. It's clearly aimed at sowing doubt about civilian casualties and rallying support for more violence and attacks."
The contentious conflict between Israel and Hamas is not limited to military operations; it also involves the spread of misinformation. For instance, Mohammed Sendik, a Palestinian whose leg was amputated months prior, discovered an image of himself online falsely linked to the ongoing Israel war. His case is just one example showcasing the impact of propaganda in this disinformation campaign.
Moreover, false allegations about victims staging their suffering have become prevalent during crises, transforming into a common tactic in disinformation. The Israel-Hamas conflict has seen an alarming increase in such claims, which experts attribute to loosened content monitoring on platforms like X (formerly Twitter).
Source: www.ntv.de
