By Srijit Das
A dated video of bulldozers demolishing tents and clearing bodies has now been shared online with a false claim that the visuals show Israeli armed forces using bulldozers to attack patients at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza.
BOOM found that the video is from 2013 and unrelated to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The footage captures a bulldozer clearing the bodies of numerous individuals who fell victim to the Rabaa massacre in Egypt at that time.
Amid Israel's ongoing offensive in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Health Minister Mai al-Kaila has accused Israeli armed forces of targeting injured patients near Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza using bulldozers. Reacting to these allegations, the World Health Organization (W.H.O) stated that it was urgently collecting information from the Kamal Adwan Hospital, which Israel claims is utilised by Hamas militants.
The old video, meanwhile, is being shared with a caption, "Israel attacks a hospital with a bulldozer Many Patients are to injured to move".
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Fact Check
BOOM conducted a reverse image search on a key frame from the viral video using the Russian search engine Yandex. The search yielded a website link, indicating that the video had been published on August 26, 2013.
The Turkish description accompanying the video stated that the footage depicts security forces in Egypt burning bodies within tents and dragging them on the ground. We further observed that the extended version of the video features the logo of the news outlet Al Jazeera within the visuals.
Taking a cue, we ran a related keyword search in Arabic and found the same video on Al Jazeera Arabic's official YouTube channel uploaded on August 26, 2013.
The Arabic description with the video translates to, "New visuals of the massacre of the dispersal of the Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in on August 14 showed a bulldozer sweeping away dozens of bodies of victims of the massacre, indifferent to the warnings of the demonstrators."
We also found several news reports by international outlets covering the incident.
A report published by The New York Times on August 14, 2013, states, "Egyptian security officers stormed two encampments packed with supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, on Wednesday in a scorched-earth assault that killed hundreds, set off a violent backlash across Egypt and underscored the new government’s determination to crush the Islamists who dominated two years of free elections."
The article further reports, "The attack began about 7 a.m. when a circle of police officers began firing tear gas at the protest camps and obliterating tents with bulldozers. Although the Interior Ministry had said it would move only gradually and leave a safe exit, soon after the attack began several thousand people appeared trapped inside the main camp, near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque, as snipers fired down on those trying to flee and riot police officers with tear gas and birdshot closed in from all sides."
On August 12, 2014, Human Rights Watch published a report after a year-long investigation into the incident known as the 'Rabaa massacre.' The report stated, "In the August 14 dispersal of the Rab’a al-Adawiya sit-in alone, security forces, following a plan that envisioned several thousand deaths, killed a minimum of 817 people and more likely at least 1,000."
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