In October 2023, a video began to circulate in which people covered with white cloth began to move. It is alleged that this is footage of a staging organized by Hamas in Gaza that accidentally leaked onto the Internet. We decided to check if this is true.

Videos of “resurrected” people went viral at the end of October. One of the users TikTok posted a video with the caption “Look, these are “dead” Gases. Now it’s clear how these creatures are deceiving the whole world?” The video has been viewed more than 322,000 times and shared by more than 4,000 accounts. Telegram channels also wrote about this video, for example “Dead Russians 200"(60,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) and "Crimean wind"(33,000).

The viral video shows people covered with pieces of white cloth, some of which read "martyr" in Arabic. Then one of the people starts to move, his smiling face is shown at the end.

Israeli users write, that this is a common (and accidentally exposed) staging for Hamas, helping to claim more deaths in the bombing of the Gaza Strip. Some Russian Telegram channels hintthat the Palestinians are following the example of the Ukrainians, who allegedly falsified the murder of Buchi civilians by the Russian military. On the latest Russian propaganda claim “Verified” wrote in April 2022. Large world media outlets also devoted detailed investigations to what happened in Bucha, for example The New York Times And Associated Press.

Using reverse search, this video can be found in earlier posts on various social networks. For example, the same video with a similar comment published on Twitter in 2021, the son of Israeli Prime Minister Yair Netanyahu. There are also earlier posts that also say that this is a Hamas staging in the Gaza Strip - for example, posted in 2018.

Back in 2021, when the video went viral in context shelling Gaza Strip, the fact-checking service of France Presse published a detailed analysis of these shots. A reverse video search led to a video posted in 2013 on YouTube-channel of the Egyptian opposition newspaper Al-Badil.

The description of the video states that this is a protest by students of al-Azhar University in Cairo. In 2013, many students took part in demonstrations in support ousted president of Egypt Mohamed Morsi and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement. There is a video on YouTube where the same action in front of the entrance to the university is filmed from a different angle.