No, video doesn’t show a Palestinian ‘crisis actor’ admitting to his mother his injuries are fake
A Palestinian patient infected with COVID-19 is admitted for medical observation at the emergency unit, in the Palestine Medical Complex, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Tuesday, March 2, 2021. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
CLAIM: A video shows a Palestinian “crisis actor” removing his bandages to show his worried mother that his injuries aren’t real.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Arabic-language experts and the Palestinian journalist who captured the emotional exchange on video say the injured man and others surrounding him were trying to calm the woman, who believed her son had been mortally wounded in an attack during the Israel-Hamas war.
THE FACTS: Social media users are continuing to push baseless claims that videos and images of the war’s growing number of casualties are staged.
The latest viral video shows a man sitting on a hospital bed with a large, bloodied bandage wrapped around his head while wearing a blood-soaked t-shirt and tattered pants.
The man appears to have other injuries on his arms and face as he and the men around him speak animatedly to the visibly emotional woman. At one point, one of the men unwraps the bandage over the bedridden man’s head to show the woman the extent of injuries underneath.
“This is gold. A Palestinian mother sees images online showing her son injured. She races to the hospital only to find it’s all fake,” one Instagram user who shared the brief clip wrote in a post that’s been liked more than 11,000 times as of Monday. “He is fine, it’s just an act mommy. It’s called Pallywood. Sad so many are being manipulated.”
But the unidentified man’s injuries are real. Both he and the men standing by his bedside are simply trying to calm the woman.
Taoufik Ben-Amor, a senior lecturer in Arabic studies at Columbia University in New York, confirmed the men are trying to assure the woman that the injuries are not that serious and that her son will be fine.
“An act of trying to protect the mother from grief,” he wrote in an email.
Nasr Abdo, who is also a lecturer at Columbia University, agreed, after reviewing the video.
“This is a very cultural thing, people and the injured patient are trying to calm the mother down by saying that he is fine and not badly injured,” he wrote in an email. “But there is no indication at all that this is acting. It’s just the way in Arabic saying he is going to be fine.”
Mohmmed Awad, a Palestinian journalist who filmed the video, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment this week, but he conveyed to Kashif, a Palestinian fact checking website, a similar explanation.
Awad, who shared a snippet of the fact check story on Instagram, said the incident happened last week at the Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Yunis, a city in southern Gaza.
He said the woman came into the hospital screaming, so he followed her to the intensive care unit where her son was being treated for a head injury.
“She thought he was martyred,” Awad told the organization in Arabic. “In the video, they were just reassuring her that her son is okay. Even the injured young man sat up and took the bandage off his head to tell her he was okay.”
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Associated Press editor Nadia Ahmed in London contributed to this story.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
