A building that looks like a mosque explodes. As the building collapses, laughter rings out, while a man comments in Hebrew. The video is old, but it has been viewed millions of times on X at the start of the week, echoing the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip.
It was shared for the first time by the Quds News Network account, close to Hamas according to the US Department of State. In its publication, also relayed on Instagram, the Palestinian media accuses “sappers of the Israeli occupation” of laughing “by detonating the charges they placed on the mosque”. “Destroying infrastructure in Gaza is a game for them,” reads the caption of the post.
Three hours later, Omar Suleiman, an American imam, reposted the video on his X, Instagram and Facebook accounts. Omar Suleiman’s post was viewed more than a million times in 24 hours on X and shared more than 800 times on Facebook.
FAKE OFF
The video is old and dates from at least 2016. A reverse image search with the Bing search engine returns a YouTube post dated January 19, 2016. The same video is visible there. As in the video relayed in recent days, we hear a man laughing and saying a few words in Hebrew. The Internet user indicates the images show the bombing of a mosque in Gaza, without anything known at the moment to corroborate this location.
There is no trace in the media of the explosion or bombing of a mosque in the Gaza Strip in 2016. Two years earlier, in the summer of 2014, the Israeli army targeted the Palestinian territory, in response to an escalation of violence after the death of three young Israelis in the West Bank. During this operation, which the Israeli army calls “Protective Edge”, 64 mosques were destroyedaccording to the Turkish Anadolu news agency.
Since the start of the war started this year in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army in response to the Hamas attacks on October 7, several mosques have been destroyed or damaged. On November 16, a little over a month after the start of the conflict, 74 mosques had been destroyed, reported Al-Jazeera, citing the Hamas-run Gaza government media office.