The images are violent. Taken from the sky, they show a group targeted by an explosive device between two tanks. Contrary to what Internet users on TikTok, Facebook or even X (formerly Twitter) claim, the targeted group is not a gathering of Palestinian children who would have been targeted by the Israeli army.
Yet this is what we can read in a message seen more than two million times on X: “A group of children gather near the water reservoir in eastern Gaza to get drinking water , and the Israeli enemy watches them from the air and throws an incendiary bomb at them, killing them,” writes an anonymous Internet user in Arabic, who displays a Palestinian flag on his profile.
His message, accompanied by the video, was published on October 21. Since then, the text has been translated and copied onto other platforms and distributed in other languages, including French.
FAKE OFF
A reverse image search returns us to two matching results, the Facebook page Sudanese from Al Jazeera and an X account titled “Sudan News” (Sudan news). On these two accounts, the video was posted on October 12. Al Jazeera specifies in its post that “a march of the Sudanese army bombed a fuel tank belonging to the Rapid Support Forces in Khartoum”.
We were actually able to geolocate the reservoirs visible in the video: they are located near the airport of the Sudanese capital. A Google Earth search for the keyword “تانكر” (reservoir) used by Al Jazeera returned us to a list of results in the capital, allowing us to identify the location of the video.
Since April 15, conflict has broken out in Sudan between the army and the Rapid Support Forces. The war has killed more than 9,000 people, a toll largely underestimated, reports AFP.
In Gaza, humanitarian aid trucks have started arriving since Saturday. Aid still insufficient according to the UN. “It’s a drop of aid in an ocean of needs,” said Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, on Tuesday, calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”. After the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, the Israeli government announced a “complete siege” of Palestinian territory.