Amid the ongoing crisis in Syria, reports state that President Bashar al-Assad has fled the country while rebel fighters have begun occupying and vandalising his mountaintop presidential palace in Damascus—a grand structure featuring red-carpeted halls, ornate reception rooms, and storerooms filled with luxurious gifts from global dignitaries (here). In this context, a widely circulated video (here, here and here) allegedly shows uniformed officials opening a Torah scroll, with claims suggesting it is 500 years old and was discovered in the palace’s basement. Let’s investigate the authenticity of this video and uncover the truth behind these claims.
Claim: The visuals showing uniformed individuals opening a 500-year-old Torah manuscript found in the basement of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s residence.
Fact: The viral video shows Tunisian authorities seizing a rare 15th-century Torah manuscript in Ben Arous, Tunisia, from smugglers on 10 March 2017. The manuscript, made of calfskin and spanning 37 meters, contains all five books of the Torah in their ancient form. The video has no connection to Syria or Bashar al-Assad, hence the claim is FALSE.
To uncover the truth, we performed a reverse image search on Google, which led us to the original upload of the video. The video was posted on the Facebook page of Attessia TV, a general news channel in Tunisia, on 13 March 2017. It was captioned: “Treasure Torah manuscript found dating back more than 500 years.”
Further research on the details from the Facebook video led us to a YouTube video uploaded by The New Arab channel on 10 March 2017. The video shows officials sitting in front of a screen displaying the Torah scroll, followed by a clip of the scroll being opened in front of them. The video was captioned: “Tunisia seizes rare Torah manuscript before smuggling it to Europe.” This confirms that the video pertains to an incident in Tunisia from 2017.
Further research led us to several reports (here and here) on the incident. According to Al Jazeera and The Times of Israel, on 10 March 2017, Tunisian authorities seized a rare 15th-century Torah manuscript in Ben Arous, preventing its smuggling to Europe. The scroll, made of calfskin and spanning 37 meters, contains all five books of the Torah in their ancient arrangement. The manuscript, written in Hebrew with special ink, was seized from an antiquities smuggling network. Though there have been recent reports of looting and vandalism at Bashar al-Assad’s residence (here), the video in question has no connection to those events.
To sum up, an old video of a 500-year-old Torah manuscript seized in Tunisia is falsely shared as being from Syria.
