A disturbing video (here and here) is making the rounds on social media, showing two men in shackles being torched to death. The video is accompanied by claims that it depicts Hamas militants burning two Israeli soldiers. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: This video shows Hamas terrorists burning two Israeli soldiers to death.
Fact: The video, in reality, is an almost seven–year-old clip released by the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group in December 2016, showing the horrific burning of two captured Turkish soldiers. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
We began our fact-checking by conducting a reverse image search on a few keyframes from the viral video. The result led us to several news reports (here, here, and here) dating back to December 2016, predating the current Israel-Palestine conflict, which started on 7th October 2023.
The reports identified the horrific video as being released by the Islamic State terrorist group. Furthermore, the news reports revealed that the video’s victims were identified as two captured Turkish soldiers, not Israeli soldiers. The original video was 19 minutes long and showcased the two uniformed men being pulled out of a cage, bound, and then set on fire. The clip was supposedly shot in the “Aleppo Province” of Northern Syria and not in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict zone.
To sum up, the video being shared as a depiction of Hamas militants burning Israeli soldiers is an old 2016 video released by ISIS. It has nothing to do with the current conflict.
