A 2020 video of a little girl and her father laughing at bomb strikes is being falsely linked to the Israel-Palestine conflict - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
October 31, 2023
A video is fast gaining traction on social media, where it shows a man and a little girl laughing when they hear a sound resembling a bomb detonation. The post accompanying the video claims this man is teaching his daughter to laugh every time they hear an air strike from Israel. This article fact-checks this claim.
Claim: The viral video shows a man teaching his daughter to laugh each time they hear an Israeli air strike.
Fact: The video does indeed feature a father teaching his daughter to laugh at bomb sounds. However, this is a video from 2020. The man in the video is named Abdullah Mohammed, and he’s a Syrian, not Israeli. Hence, this claim is False.
In order to uncover the truth behind the claim, we began with a simple internet search using keywords related to the video and its shared content. This led us to several news reports (here and here) about this video dating back to 2020.
According to these reports, the video features Abdullah Mohammed, a Syrian father. He managed to turn a bombing situation into a game for his then-three-year-old daughter, Salwa. Mohammed would encourage his daughter to laugh every time they heard a bomb sound. This video gained a significant amount of attention and went viral in 2020. Many news outlets widely reported Abdullah’s approach to helping his daughter cope with their situation.
However, the claim that this video is related to Israeli air strikes is unfounded. The father and daughter in the video are Syrian, and the incident is related to their experience in Syria, not Israel.
To sum up, although the video does feature a father teaching his daughter to laugh at bomb sounds, the claim that this situation is related to Israeli air strikes is False. The family in the video is Syrian, and the incident took place in Idlib, Syria, not Israel.