Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, dated May 9, 2023, targeting Islamic Jihad — the second-largest Palestinian armed group in Gaza, have resulted in the reignition of the conflict between the two countries. Palestinian militants, in retaliation, launched approximately 800 rockets on Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Against this backdrop, a viral video showing people running away from the beach while a siren is blaring in the background is doing the rounds on social media. Many users have shared the video claiming that people are running away from Tel Aviv beach after the escalation of attacks from Gaza.
A Facebook user posted the viral post with a caption: A mass escape of settlers from Tel Aviv beach leaving behind their clothes.
You can check the post here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the viral post, and found it to be misleading.
Running a Reverse Image Search of the video keyframes, we identified an Instagram post on an unverified profile, dated May 16, 2021. The video matches exactly with the viral clip and through the caption the user is trying to tell the story of the residents of Tel Aviv and what their lives have become ever since the war started.
The caption informs that people in the city have to drop everything and run to the safest place they can find as soon as the siren rings. The siren is the indicator of an attack from an opposing force.
Although the video does show people running to save their lives, the date of posting of the video confirms that it has been online since last two years. So, it cannot be linked to the ongoing war.
We also came across a Facebook post from the same day on the official page of Al Jazeera Channel. The caption, written in Arabic, translates to: ‘The moment of the apostates escaped from one of the beaches in Tel Aviv after the sirens were blown off’.
Here too, we can see that the video matches the viral clip and the date of posting predates the ongoing attacks. We found similar videos from 2021 posted on the official handles of Al Jazeera Egypt, Israel en Guatemala, and Israel en Peru, as well.
Therefore, we can conclusively say that the viral post, claiming to show people in Tel Aviv running away from the beach because of the ongoing attack from Gaza, is misleading.
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