On 03 August 2025, mass protests erupted across West Bank cities like Ramallah and Hebron against the Gaza war and in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners, featuring visuals that highlighted the growing humanitarian crisis. In this backdrop, a disturbing video is circulating on social media claiming to show Israeli police strangling a Palestinian child to death after he recited the Kalima Shahadah — let’s find the truth behind this video.
Claim: The viral video shows Israeli police strangling a Palestinian child to death during a recent protest.
Fact: The video is from February 2015 and shows a Swedish security guard assaulting a 9-year-old boy at Malmö train station for ticket evasion. The boy did not die. The video has no link to the current Israel-Palestine conflict. Hence, the claim is FALSE.
To verify the truth, we performed a reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the viral video. This led us to a YouTube video published on 10 February 2015, which shows the same visuals—two Swedish security officers detaining two Muslim children at a train station in Malmö, Sweden. The incident reportedly took place on 6 February 2015, when a 9-year-old boy was allegedly assaulted for travelling without a ticket. The video was also shared by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK, which described it as visuals of a security guard slamming a young Muslim boy’s head to the ground.
Further research into the incident led us to an article published on 12 February 2015 by the UK-based news website The Independent, which featured the same visuals seen in the viral video. The report stated that a Swedish security guard at Malmö train station had assaulted a 9-year-old boy and his friend for travelling without a ticket. The guard allegedly slammed the boy to the ground and covered his mouth and face, during which the distressed child recited the Islamic prayer, Shahada. Contrary to the viral claim, the boy did not die. Both children were detained for fare evasion, and the two security guards involved were later taken into police custody after the assault was caught on camera.
A few other news articles that reported this incident can be found here and here. Based on all this evidence, it can be concluded that the video shared in the post is from an old incident that took place in Sweden. This video had previously gone viral with a similar claim, which was debunked by Factly at the time.
To sum it up, an unrelated old video from Sweden is shared as visuals of Israeli police personnel strangulating a Palestinian child.
