At the end of October 2023, a video showing a man holding a corpse in his hands went viral on social networks. The captions for the video say that Israeli soldiers cut off the child's head and inserted a video camera in its place. We decided to check the correctness of such statements.
Story found viral popularity on TikTok, where one of rollers received more than 1 million views, other - By some dozens thousand. Moreover, users are not only share the video itself, but also demonstrate their emotions after it viewing. Usually what's happening on video describe like this: Israeli soldiers cut off the child's head and inserted a camera in its place. In addition, you can find the following details: “took a photo And sent the father of the child", "the corpse of the child sent parents" or "mother cried, holding the baby's skin." This video is also used in quality justification of the anti-Semitic action in Dagestan.
Most publications use a very short fragment of video or only a screenshot with blur, from which it is impossible to understand what is really happening.
However, some users post more complete video. By the ticking line at the bottom and the characteristic plaque indicating the location of the action, as well as the crying presenter shown in the studio in the second part of the video, you can understand that this is a fragment of some kind of news broadcast.
The logo of the Arabic-language Al-Ghad TV channel is visible in the video. From the "About Us" section on his website should, that it is a channel operating from Egypt, focusing on economic, political, cultural and sports news, as well as the production of documentaries. Al-Ghad TV uploads its videos to YouTube. There you can also find full version of the video that became viral - however, the authors retouched not only the boy’s body, but also the people around him. The video, about 2.5 minutes long, was published on October 13 at 22:30 Moscow time.
The same fragment was used by the TV channel earlier in the day, but without the presenter's commentary, apparently in a live broadcast. broadcasts from the scene of events. An excerpt from the broadcast lasting just over 6 minutes appeared on YouTube on October 13 at 17:57 Moscow time. It clearly shows that a man takes the corpse of a child from a person near an ambulance, stands nearby for a while, and then lifts the headless body high and walks into the crowd. Some of the subsequent events are not shown using blur, then the man leaves the crowd and stands at the hospital wall for some time. The voice-over describes what is happening: in Arabic, the commentator says that the wounded are arriving in the courtyard of the Al-Ahly hospital during a series of airstrikes from Israel; he named the beheaded child in the frame as a victim of one of these attacks. There is no information in the video that the head was cut off by Israeli soldiers, much less anything is said about the camera inserted into the corpse.
From Al-Ghad TV materials it is clear that the man with the beheaded child was filmed from other angles. One such video, filmed from the hospital wall, "Verified" found on X (formerly Twitter). It begins from the moment when the man is already holding the body of the child, and ends immediately after he passes with this body to the crowd of people filming. There is no blur in this video, and judging by the gestures and facial expressions of those around, it can be assumed that some people standing nearby do not approve of what is happening. One man in particular tugs on a man's T-shirt and points in the opposite direction as if to say, "Get out of here." However, the crowd could also have shown the person the way towards the entrance to the hospital, because for some reason he went in the opposite direction.
Both videos - from Al-Ghad TV and from user X - clearly show that no camera was inserted into the child’s head. Most likely, the users who spread the viral statement saw exactly the screenshot where a man stands behind the body, filming what is happening on a phone mounted on a selfie stick. This created the illusion that the camera was inside the child’s neck. However, videos taken from a different angle refute this.
Judging by the objects that were caught in the frame, the boy’s body was indeed taken to Al-Ahly hospital in Gaza - its characteristic facade, and also tiled canopy in the yard. This hospital can be seen on photographs numerous media, telling O situations in the Gaza Strip.
Comparison of a fragment of a viral video (top) with a screenshot from the Getty Images photo bank (bottom). Collage “Checked”
The information announced in the live broadcast of Al-Ghad TV that victims of airstrikes were arriving at the hospital is in good agreement with the fact that on the morning of October 13, Israel attacked a number of targets in the Gaza Strip. In a press release from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) it saysthat 750 Hamas-affiliated targets were hit. Times of Israel war correspondent Emmanuel Fabian reported in X that at night the military destroyed a 12-story building in which, according to intelligence information, Hamas militants were located.
Apparently, the child caught in the viral video was the victim of an airstrike, and not beheading by Israeli soldiers, who were simply not present in the Gaza Strip on October 13 (IDF started ground operation only two weeks later). This version is also supported by the nature of the injuries received: from the video it is clear that the child’s head was not cut off exactly (as would be the case in the case of decapitation with a knife or other sharp object), the neck, part of the soft tissue of the head and fragments of the skull were preserved. The airstrike and the subsequent explosion are in themselves quite Maybe cause such injuries that even a single bomb can tear off a person's head (so happened, for example, with a suicide bomber who carried out a terrorist attack at Moscow Domodedovo Airport in 2011). Moreover, on the Internet you can find video evidence how they look beheaded bodies as a result of airstrikes: they have the same injuries as the child in the viral video.
Finally, regarding the statement that the father of the murdered man received the body in this form. If you carefully watch a fragment of the video when the ambulance is just approaching the hospital, you will notice that several people are running up to it from the crowd, in particular a man in a light T-shirt and black pants with a characteristic white vertical stripe along the seam. The car doors were still closed at that moment. The man carrying the child in the video, shot from a different angle, is dressed exactly the same.
Moreover, he can be seen in an earlier fragment of the live broadcast - this man stands not at the entrance to the hospital, but in the crowd, then begins to move towards the cars approaching the hospital and finally takes the headless body from someone’s hands and walks with it back to the crowd. From this we can conclude that the man in the viral video holding the headless corpse is likely a local resident who is not related to the child.
Thus, contrary to allegations circulating on TikTok, there is no evidence that the child in the viral video died at the hands of Israeli soldiers, who cut off his head, and no one placed a camera on a tripod in its place. Most likely, the child suffered non-life-threatening injuries due to the IDF airstrike and subsequent explosion. The man holding the corpse is, in all likelihood, not the child’s father at all; he was in the square in front of the hospital before the ambulance arrived at the entrance, and then grabbed the body and decided to show it off to others.
Cover image: Verified collage
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