Over the last few months the war between Israel and Hamas has claimed thousands of
lives. Around two million people have been internally displaced inside Gaza as Israel
pursues its response to the 7th October attacks. If you’re trying to follow what’s going on you
can be faced with a bewildering array of news and information. Online, there’s a constant
flow of claim and counterclaim. Each side is fighting to get their version of events across.
Israel does not target, does not target, I repeat non-combatants, innocent civilians.
No-one can get out from the Shifa hospital. No-one can come to the
Shifa hospital. Situation is very, very dangerous. I'm a mother. I can't give solutions, I’m a mum.
I can say one thing. I want my children back. But truth can be a casualty in any war. If you
go online you can find extraordinary reporting and heartbreaking stories. But you’ll also find
misinformation and deliberate lies. So what’s going on? I’m Olga Robinson. In this episode of
BBC Trending’s Power series we’ll be investigating how online disinformation about Israel and Gaza
is being used to try to seize control of the narrative. I’ll be joined by Shayan Sardarizadeh,
who like me works for BBC Verify. Hi Olga. We’ll be covering some
of the different sorts of propaganda which our team has been investigating during this
conflict. And we’ll be exploring the motives of those spreading disinformation on social media.
Before we begin, a warning - some of the material we’ll be discussing may be distressing for some
people. Now throughout this episode we’ll be hearing from Eliot Higgins. He’s the founder
of the investigative website Bellingcat. And I asked Eliot for an overview of what they’ve
been seeing online during the war so far. Well, it's really the worst I've ever seen in
terms of disinformation and the way social media has been used to propagate disinformation. It's
very much the same kind of thing we've seen in other conflicts. So, for example, misattributed
images, claims that are made about images that aren’t really backed up by what the images show,
misinterpreted information and some of it is just outright grifting by social media users.
That’s a lot to explore. Let’s start with this dramatic video that’s had millions of
views. As the video begins we see a group of tanks moving across a hazy desert landscape.
But their advance is a disaster. Over the next nine minutes they’re picked off one by one. By
the end the horizon is littered with smoking wreckage. The video’s Arabic caption warns the
Israeli army to leave Gaza or face extermination. This footage of an Israeli tank regiment has been
widely shared across social media. But it’s fake. It actually comes from a video game called Arma 3.
It’s just one of numerous scenes taken from Arma 3 and other games that somebody has tried to
pass off as genuine footage from Gaza, Ukraine or another war. Some of these fakes are easy to spot,
especially if you are a gamer. But the comments show many people are taken in. The tanks video
got more than five million views when it was shared by a British politician - even though
many users pointed out that it isn’t real. Arma 3 is a popular choice for this sort
of fakery because the gameplay looks very realistic. Players can also customise it to
show any sort of battle. But the company that made the game is horrified that its product
is being misused to deliberately deceive people. Hello, my name is Marek Spanel and I'm the founder
and CEO of Bohemia Interactive, we are a computer games company from Prague, the Czech Republic. My
message will be quite simple. Like it's great if you record footage from games, but it's
absolutely wrong and completely disgusting when you try to basically mislead people.
And you have fun out of it. This is completely unacceptable. And I can only say just don't do it.
There may be a bit of wish fulfillment about the clip of the tanks. Israeli tank columns
are not being destroyed like this in real life. But the content of many of the game
videos isn’t that different to genuine footage from Gaza. So why are people bothering to post
the fakes? Marek believes the culprits are mostly motivated by internet fame rather than ideology.
Most often it's probably just really random individuals kind of feeling it's fun, doing
it without really getting much of even profit. But just doing it to get the feeling I made something
look how many people I fooled maybe look how many people were misled by this stupid post I made.
When this phenomenon first emerged a few years ago, Marek and his colleagues tried to stop
the fakes by reporting them to social media companies. But there were just too many to
keep up with. So now they concentrate on working with journalists to help debunk the most high
profile examples. Marek believes education is the way forward. Users need to learn how
easily technology can be used to fool them. Arma 3 could soon be left behind in the realism stakes.
You have many other tools nowadays, especially the AI powered tools that are even more powerful in
some aspects to recreate the real life footage. Pretty much everyone can create nearly any type
of footage, so pretty much the only reasonable conclusion is that unless you know the source,
just don't trust any digital footage at all. If these video game clips are fantasy presented
as reality, then the next form of disinformation we’re looking at is the exact opposite. That’s
when reality is falsely dismissed as fake. Let’s call it “Denialism”. On pro-Israeli social media
there’s been a huge surge of the term Pallywood - a combination of the words Palestine and
Hollywood. It was coined almost two decades ago as a term to dismiss Palestinian allegations of
mistreatment as fabrications. Between October and December last year Pallywood was mentioned more
than 430,000 times on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Israeli government officials
and celebrities are among those who’ve used it to claim that evidence of the suffering of
Palestinian civilians has actually been staged for propaganda purposes. During the current conflict,
“denialism” has even extended to false allegations that the deaths of children have been faked for
the cameras. Our colleagues from BBC Arabic’s Gaza Today programme spoke to two Palestinian
photojournalists who were caught up in one such incident in December. Ali Jadallah covers Gaza
for the Turkish Anadolu news agency. I was in Shuhada al-Aqsa hospital
in Deir al Balah when the martyred child arrived and his grandfather was holding him and his mum
was next to him and it was a horrific scene. The dead child was five-month-old Muhammad
Hani Al-Zanir. His body was wrapped in a white shroud with just his face exposed.
Muhammad’s distraught relatives hugged the tiny bundle as journalists gathered round.
The child was very young - he was an infant. His grandfather was doing interviews in front
of the cameras while he was hugging him. I took pictures of the child with his grandfather,
with his mum, the goodbye looks of his mum and how she cried for him. Just like all the
other pictures of the children we take everyday. Another journalist called Omar Dirawi filmed the
video you can hear in the background. But when the images of this harrowing scene went viral
on social media, many posts falsely claimed Muhammad wasn’t real. That the body in the
photos was actually a doll. These claims were amplified by an article by the Jerusalem Post.
The influential Israeli newspaper said the pictures taken by the journalists proved that
the dead boy was fake. The article prompted an outcry. Here’s Omar Dirawi, the noise you
can hear in this clip is from a nearby drone. A mother is saying goodbye to her son and all
the details show that he is a human, even his colour shows he is human and nothing indicates
that he is a doll - and they have the audacity to post that he is a doll. Couldn’t you focus on the
details? Are all the other children dolls too? After the backlash, the Jerusalem Post removed
the article from its website. In a statement on social media it said that the report had
been “based on faulty sourcing". Eliot Higgins from Bellingcat says that decades
of tensions and violence between Israelis and Palestinians have created conditions in which
disinformation and misinformation can flourish. Attitudes and mindsets are hardened by years of
mistrust. And people are less prone to question information which reinforces their beliefs.
Ultimately, they aren’t really interested in the truth. They're interested in their side being
right, and often that means denying that their side's responsibility for what's happening to the
other side so they can feel that their hands are clean, that everything the other side is saying
has to be untrue because if that's true, then I'm a bad person for actually supporting my side.
As Eliot suggests, denialism isn’t a phenomenon that’s unique to one side.
I'm James Longman. I'm a foreign correspondent for ABC News in the United States.
James arrived in Israel in the hours after the 7th October attacks. He interviewed a
16-year-old survivor who was recovering in hospital. Rotem Mathias told James
how Hamas fighters had come to his kibbutz and murdered his parents in front of him.
The terrorists shot open the door, shot, they threw a grenade or something that exploded.
The last thing my dad said is he lost his arm and then my mum died on top of me.
And for 45 minutes he lay underneath his mother's dead body whilst these men stalked
his house for other survivors other victims. I was terrified. I didn't make any noise. And
I prayed for any God. I didn't really care which God, I just prayed for
a God. That they won't find me. And when you did the interview.
Do you remember how it made you feel like when you just reported it.
He was in tears. His sister was in tears their grandfather who was with us,
our camera man, the hospital porters, the nurses,
the doctors and I was in tears. I mean, all of us sitting there listening to what he had to say.
However, after the interview was broadcast James discovered heavily-edited material from
his report was appearing online to put across a very different story. Pro-Palestinian accounts
were claiming that Rotem and his sisters were "crisis actors". That they were lying about
their parents' deaths and were struggling to hold in their laughter in front of the camera.
That the 7th October attacks were not real. I was very, very surprised. I didn't think
that people would take an actual clip from a verified news source like ABC News and
seek to pretend that the opposite of what was happening was happening. It's so easily debunked,
it's so easily disproved. And yet over a million people saw this information and according to the
comments many of them believed it. Some online attempts to deceive have
unintended consequences. They may spawn further misinformation from a different direction. And
it can even have a negative impact on innocent people. In mid-November pro-Israeli accounts
shared what was claimed to be a video of a nurse at the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
I can't believe I'm doing this, but the world has to know, has to know what Hamas is making here.
The partially-masked woman on screen claimed Hamas was snatching vital hospital supplies,
leaving ordinary Palestinians to suffer. I have to fix a fracture for a five,
a five year old boy without morphine because Hamas took it for themselves.
But the video was quickly debunked as a fake. One telltale sign was that audio analysis revealed
those explosions in the background were the same sound effect repeated again and again. It’s still
not clear who made it. But soon claims appeared online wrongly identifying the woman in the
video as a Mexican-Israeli influencer called Hannah Abutbul. At first Hannah thought the
people making the claims were joking. And I think the only thing that looks
alike is the glasses. But it's like, really stupid to think that someone is
another person just because of the glasses. Hannah is a former actress whose face is well
known on Israeli social media. So she says it would be really dumb for her to pretend to be
a Palestinian nurse. But the false accusation led to a torrent of online abuse and threats.
I woke up in the morning and I saw a lot of message of hate, like saying horrible things,
like really cruel things and at the beginning it was like, okay,
so it will be over like a couple hours and that's it. But then it was like bigger and bigger.
Hannah messaged several of the accounts that had accused her, to explain they had got it wrong.
Most of them were not responding. One of them blocked me and the other were like,
'You are Israeli propaganda. How much did you get paid' and you know comments like this.
Things got so bad that Hannah became scared to leave home. She even received abuse from
Israelis who believed she was the fake nurse. So they were like commenting. 'Why did you do that?
That just makes us make us look bad, like as a country. We're not like them. We're not
like Hamas. We don't have to make these videos.' It’s been a feature of this war that several of
the big social media accounts that have been busy spreading disinformation have a history of doing
the same thing in other conflicts. There’s been a degree of recycling and repurposing
of old material to create new disinformation. Here’s Eliot Higgins from Bellingcat again.
So one thing we've seen a lot of is images from the conflict in Syria being reattributed
to what's happening in Gaza and often this is being done by accounts that have previously
kind of denied the crimes that have been shown in these images because they take a pro-Assad
position in their social media posts. Finally let’s look at an example of how
the situation in the Middle East has been used to spread disinformation intended to influence
events thousands of miles away. And it’s an example that involved some familiar faces. In
December this video appeared online claiming that a Ukrainian official was going to be charged with
selling weapons to Hamas. The video looked like it was made by BBC News. And it cited Bellingcat
as the source of the revelations. Clips of Eliot and my BBC colleague Shayan flashed up on screen
next to quotes attributed to them. However, everything about this video was fake. One of
the many clues was that although the video was in English it was first posted on a pro-Kremlin
Russian language channel on Telegram. Shayan and Eliot had previously debunked several fake BBC
videos. So might their appearance in the December one be somebody’s idea of revenge? Or even a joke?
Both Eliot and Shayan are more used to exposing disinformation than appearing in it. So I asked
them what they make of their starring roles? It's a fairly crude attempt at propaganda
in many senses, but it the production, it's very close to what you'd expect to see from
a BBC video. So I have seen some people tricked by it, but fortunately they've
not really gone viral yet as far as I can tell. I think it was basically an attempt at trolling
us, but to be perfectly honest, my main concern is not people with a platform like me or Eliot being
targeted. My main concern always has been and will continue to be, people who don't have a platform,
don't necessarily have a voice, and in the in context of this conflict, a mother who's
just lost a baby who's just a few months old. And then videos and images of that incident,
of the mother holding her baby who is now dead, being shared online by people claiming you know
that baby is a doll and that mother is faking it. That's the aspect of disinformation that
is to me is the most horrific side of it. That’s it for this episode of BBC Trending
with me Olga Robinson. My thanks to Shayan Sardarizadeh, Eliot Higgins as well as Ibrahim
Abdelbaki and Marwa Gamal from Gaza Today. The producer was Ed Main and Flora Carmichael was our
editor. If you want to get in touch then you can do so by emailing me at Olga.Robinson@bbc.co.uk