A video featuring a room full of weapons is being shared with a claim that it shows the weapons found by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in the Al-Shifa hospital located in the Gaza Strip. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: This video shows weapons found by the IDF in Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza.
Fact: The video predates the IDF discovery and is falsely linked to Al-Shifa. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To check the claim’s veracity, we conducted a keyword search, confirming (here, here, and here) that the IDF did discover weapons in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital. However, no evidence of the viral video was found on the IDF’s official X page, disassociating it from the Al-Shifa discovery.
To trace the origin of the viral video, a reverse image search on the internet using a few of its keyframes led us to the same video posted on X on 31 August 2023. The user who uploaded the video described it as visuals of weapons caught in Ramallah.
Further internet search uncovered a news report by allisrael.com detailing an incident in which the IDF, alongside others, found dozens of weapons in the house of a 26-year-old Palestinian in Ramallah. Although the report did not include the viral video, the described weapons’ type and quantity matched those in the video. The viral video predates the Al-Shifa discovery, rendering the claim misleading.
To sum up, the viral video falsely claims to depict weapons found in Al-Shifa hospital by the IDF. Instead, it predates this discovery and actually shows weapons found in Ramallah.
