Fighters from various countries not sailing to Palestine; video found misleading
A viral video on the social media platform Facebook shows a fleet of boats marching forward with the Palestinian flag. The caption of the video claims that soldiers from different countries are heading to Palestine by boat to fight against Israel. Dismislab verification reveals that this assertion is false. The video is from Malaysia and it does not depict soldiers heading to Palestine. In fact, in the aftermath of Israeli attacks in Gaza last October, Malaysian fishermen were expressing support for the Palestinians by holding a symbolic procession in their territorial waters.
On April 16, a user posted a 19-second video reel on Facebook. The video features Bengali text that reads: “These are not racing boats; they are soldiers from different countries coming to Palestine to fight against Israel. Alhamdulillah, victory is for sure.” At the time of writing this report, the video had been viewed by 567,000 people, received 56,000 reactions, and was shared almost 7,500 times. Additionally, there were nearly 2,000 comments.
The video shows Malaysian flags alongside the Palestinian flags. Dismislab conducted a reverse image search and found a report from the Indonesian news outlet Serambi News. Serambi News traced the video back to an Instagram account posted on October 21, 2023.
Dismislab was able to identify the video on the Instagram account. The video caption is in Indonesian. “Looks like Malaysian prisoners. Could it be that they are heading towards Gaza by sea? If so, this is their struggle to save Muslims who are being persecuted by the Zionist Jews of Israel,” a Google translation reads.
In the comments section of the video, a user commented: “I am Malaysian, this event occurred in Terengganu State on the east coast of Malaysia. This is just a solidarity program in support of Palestine. If you search by typing ‘Drawbridge Terengganu’, you will find videos of Terengganu sailors.”
To learn more, Dismislab contacted Sakina Mohammed, editor of the Malaysian fact-checking organization MyCheck. Later, Sakina Mohammed informed Dismislab that he was able to identify the flag of Terengganu State in the video. He sent Dismislab several videos from TikTok (1, 2, 3) as well as a report from a Malaysian newspaper about a boat parade in Terengganu. The videos appear to have been uploaded to TikTok in October 2023 and have captions that mention a “Boat Parade in Terengganu in Support of Palestine.”
In the news article sent by Sakina, which was published in the same month, it is stated that hundreds of boats were participating in the parade, and many of the people watching were holding Palestinian flags.
Previously, misinformation regarding the conflict between Palestine and Israel spread through social media in Bangladesh. Fact-checking organizations in Bangladesh, including Dismislab, Rumor Scanner, and Fact-Watch, have verified images, videos, or posts and demonstrated that these claims are false and propagandistic. For instance, it was claimed on Facebook and TikTok that the Iranian military was heading towards Palestine. However, verification reports revealed that the video was old and related to a different incident – primarily, a missile attack by the Ukrainian military. Moreover, various pieces of misinformation about the Palestine-Israel conflict have been spread at different times.
