A mother was filmed in Gaza on December 1, holding the body of her dead son in her arms after he was killed in the latest wave of Israeli bombardments. However, once the footage was uploaded online, several people and a prominent Israeli paper claimed that the dead infant was just a doll. They were wrong – we learned details about the child’s identity and spoke to forensic specialists who confirmed the images did show the remains of a human infant. This is part of a trend among pro-Israeli users to claim that images from Gaza have been staged.
Warning: some of the images and descriptions in this article may be distressing for some readers.
If you only have a minute
- Israeli media outlet The Jerusalem Post reported on December 1 that videos of a mother and grandfather in Gaza holding the body of a dead baby were staged and the infant’s body was, in fact, a doll.
- Several pro-Israeli accounts on X and Instagram also circulated the same claims along with the hashtag "Pallywood" (a contraction of "Palestine" and "Hollywood") to denounce what they claimed was a fictional video.
- However, our team consulted forensic doctors who, upon analysing the images, said they did indeed show the remains of a human baby.
- Turkish news agency Anadolu has also reported that the baby was five months old and his name was Muhammad Hani al-Zahar.
- After this emerged, The Jerusalem Postdeleted its article and apologised on X on December 2, admitting that they had published an “article based on faulty sourcing” that “did not meet our editorial standards”.
The fact-check, in detail
As Israeli bombardments of Gaza resumed, so did widespread online claims of disinformation. On December 1, the day that Israel launched new airstrikes after a week-long truce with Hamas, several accounts on X and Instagram started claiming that video showing a dead baby in Gaza had been staged.
Videos showing a mother and grandfather with the dead baby were initially posted by two Palestinian photojournalists on their Instagram account (Warning, graphic images: here and here) on the morning of December 1. In one sequence, the distraught grandfather shows the baby’s body to a crowd. The infant is wrapped in a white shroud, his eyes glassy and his skin waxen.
In the hours after these videos were posted online, a number of pro-Israeli social media users began to question their authenticity. One tweet, viewed more than 200,000 times, says “A new video from Hamas Pictures shows Gazans crying over a doll that 'died' during IDF attacks.”
"That's a plastic/toy baby. Heights of propaganda,” reads a tweet from an Indian X user that has been viewed more than 300,000 times.
The Jerusalem Post also picked up accusations that the scene had been staged. On December 1, this conservative Israeli newspaper published an article titled “Al Jazeera posts blurred doll, claims it to be a dead Palestinian baby”. They were referencing an article by Qatari media outlet Al Jazeera that featured one of the Instagram videos of the dead child.
"It is unclear if Al Jazeera had edited the footage themselves in an attempt to deliberately mislead the public or if they had shared the footage without properly researching the background,” The Jerusalem Post's article reads.
A five-month-old baby named Muhammad Hani al-Zahar
In reality, these videos do show a dead Gazan baby and not a doll. Aside from the two independent journalists who posted their videos on Instagram, Turkish news agency Anadolu was also on-site and provided more information about the context and the identity of the victim.
Andalou posted about 40 photos of the scene on its site, reporting that the child was a five-month-old baby named Muhammed Hani al-Zahar. Anadolu said that the photos were taken in Deir al-Balah a few hours after Israel began bombing Gaza again on December 1. They reported that the baby’s mother, Asmahan Attia al-Zahar, and his grandfather, Attia Abu Amra, were bringing Muhammad’s body to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Our team contacted a journalist from Ali Jadallah press agency, who provided us with photos and documents from the Al-Aqsa Hospital. These documents provided details on his identity and his death linked to Israeli bombing.
Our team showed the photos and videos of the baby to two forensic doctors.
One of them, Caroline Rambaud, a forensic doctor who works with the Appeals Court in Versailles, said that "these images were consistent with a baby that had only been dead a short amount of time.”
She noted that the child’s eyes were still moist and his lips were not yet dry. Moreover, his body had not yet become rigid – a sign that he died less than two to three hours before the video was filmed.
The Israeli bombing campaign began on the morning of December 1. Al-Aqsa Hospital declared the baby dead at 12:54 pm, according to the documents we saw.
The Jerusalem Post admits to 'faulty sourcing'
The Jerusalem Post was widely criticized on X. However, on December 2, the publication shared a tweet admitting to their error and apologising to readers.
"We shared an article based on faulty sourcing. The article in question did not meet our editorial standards and was thus removed,” the tweet read. “We regret this incident and remain committed to upholding the highest journalistic standards at all times.”
‘Pallywood’: Recurrent false accusations since the start of the war
This is far from the first time that false accusations have circulated online that the images coming out of Gaza have been staged.
In mid-October, a video by a Palestinian reporter emerged, showing a child’s body with the same waxen hue as the baby in the recent video. In response, the official X account of the state of Israel and the Israeli embassy in France falsely accused Palestinian civilians of using a doll to stage the scene.
However, a photographer with Agence France-Presse who was also on site confirmed to their fact-checking colleagues at AFP Factuel that the body in the footage was indeed a dead child.
The FRANCE 24 Observers has also investigated other accusations that images in Gaza have been staged. These claims are often shared under the hashtag #Pallywood, a theory that actors are staging the horrors for social media, which has reemerged since the war between Israel and Hamas.
For example, since the start of the war, pro-Israeli social media users have targeted a Gazan social media user named Saleh al-Jafarawi, falsely claiming that he is a "Hamas actor".
In early November, our team investigated an emerging pattern – that many of these “Pallywood” claims were circulated by anti-Palestinian Indian accounts that support the Hindu nationalist party of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is often accused of stigmatising Muslims.
Case in point: one of the most widely shared tweets from December 1 about the dead baby video was from an X account called "Mr Sinha", an Indian account with roughly 140,000 followers. The profile states that “Mr Sinha” is a pro-Hindu journalist.
