After the militant attack on Israel on October 7, a video depicting the group’s actions became popular on social networks. It allegedly contains Russian speech. We checked whether such statements are true.
Information about what orders militants were given on Russian language, Can find in numerous posts users social networks. The evidence used is a video allegedly published by the Hamas movement, filmed in the first hours of the attack on Israel, as well as its fragments of varying lengths. Users hear two commands in the video: “Cover” and “Let’s go.”
October 11 such a video published on its YouTube channel (108,000 views) the Russian human rights project Gulagu.net. Its founder Vladimir Osechkin* during stream on the YouTube channel “Feigin Live” wondered whether the supposed “Russian-speaking instructors” were fighters from the Wagner PMC. The next day with a similar video shared in X (formerly Twitter) Advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Anton Gerashchenko. His tweet received 4.5 million views. News notes on this topic, mainly with reference to Gulagu.net, posted And Media: For example, UNIAN, MigNews And GordonUA.
Radical Islamist group Hamas, recognized terrorist in many countries of the world, attacked Israel on the morning of October 7. The militants launched a series of rocket attacks across the country, and also destroyed the wall on the border of the Gaza Strip. penetrated to border settlements. As a result of the militants' actions, according to the latest Israeli estimates, at least 1,400 people were killed, another 222 were taken taken hostage.
The video that went viral on social networks was filmed, as can be seen from the recording itself, after the destruction of the border wall. And it was posted online no later than 17:04 Moscow time on October 8, when appeared in a large (723,000 subscribers at the time of writing this analysis) Telegram channel, the name of which can be translated from Arabic as “Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.” Also called military wing of Hamas, but official website grouping contains a link to another channel. The caption for the video reads: “Scenes of the assault by the Qassam Brigades on the Erez base (there is a checkpoint on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. - Ed.). During Operation #Al-Aqsa Flood, several enemy soldiers were killed or captured.”
To figure out what language the people in the video were speaking and what they were saying, Verified turned to journalists from the Arab Fact Checkers Network (AFCN) for help. Rana Salahat from the Moroccan project Tahaqaq, after watching the video, told us that no language other than Arabic was heard in the video. At the seventh second, instead of the supposed Russian “Cover,” the person says in Arabic: “Bend your head,” and then follows a phrase, also in Arabic, which can be translated into Russian as “I will fight.”
Orientalist Ruslan Suleymanov I also watched the video at the request of “Verified”. He did not hear commands in Russian in the video, and for more detailed comments he turned to friends who speak the Palestinian dialect of Arabic. Thus, a resident of Gaza made out phrases in the video that can be translated as “Get out of here,” “Hey, put your head down,” and “Let’s go, let’s go.” A Palestinian living in Jerusalem also heard the order to lower his head, as well as the Arabic-language remark “Let's go, guys.”
A video about Russian-speaking instructors among Hamas militants also interested fact checkers from the Georgian project “Myth Detector”. They asked to watch a video from Jordanian journalists from Fatabyyano, a fact-checking publication. They testified that there is no Russian language in the video; all dialogues are conducted in the Palestinian dialect of Arabic. In particular, Fatabyyano employees reported that “the video contains the phrases “Keep your head down, man,” “God is great, God is great,” “Walk, walk.” Several words from the conversation are incomprehensible due to the noise, although they also sound in Arabic.”
When asked why the interviewed Arabic speakers heard different words in many of their remarks, Suleymanov explained that this language has a huge number of dialects - not always, for example, an Algerian and a Syrian can easily understand each other. In the case being tested, everything becomes more complicated and the sound quality on the recording is not the best. At the same time, all the native Arabic speakers and people who use it in their professional activities that we and our colleagues interviewed agreed on one thing: no other language other than Arabic is heard in the video.
Thus, two independent fact-checking Arabic-language editorial offices immediately confirmed that no commands in Russian were heard in the attack captured on video. People for whom Arabic is their native language or actively used in their work also agreed on this.
*The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation added Vladimir Osechkin to the list of foreign agents.
Cover image: still image from the analyzed video
If you find a spelling or grammatical error, please let us know by highlighting the error text and clicking Ctrl+Enter.
