As the Israel-Palestine war intensifies, a video portraying a large group of people walking in an open space is going viral on social media platforms. The accompanying narration states that the footage is showing an exodus from the Gaza Strip. This fact-check article looks at this exodus claim.
Claim: The video shows a mass exodus from the Gaza Strip amidst the Israel – Palestine tensions.
Fact: The video actually shows a crowd of parents at the swearing-in ceremony of Azerbaijani soldiers in August 2023 and not an exodus from the Gaza Strip. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To learn more about the viral video, we performed a reverse image search on a few frames to find similar media on the internet. This search led us to the Azerbaijani news platform Baku TV’s YouTube channel, which uploaded the same video on 14 August 2023.
According to the title of this video, it documented a crowd of parents at a swearing-in ceremony of the Azerbaijani army recruits.
In addition, we cross-referenced this video with reliable reporting on such an event in Azerbaijan. A search on the internet led us to a news report on this swearing-in ceremony of young soldiers. Azertac, the Azerbaijan state news agency, published this report.
We also found a few more articles on this event (here and here). Contrary to the claim that the viral video shows people in the Gaza Strip, it actually shows a crowd gathered at a swearing-in ceremony of soldiers in Azerbaijan. Also, this video is available on the internet from August 2023, way before the Palestine-Israel conflict started on 7 October 2023.
To sum up, the video circulating visuals showing exodus from the Gaza Strip is actually from a swearing-in ceremony for Azerbaijani soldiers.
