Videos circulating on social media since Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran claiming to show Haniyeh’s final moments, are old videos of an injured Palestinian, UN-affiliated fact-checking tool iVerify confirmed on Thursday
Since the death of the prominent Palestinian political leader and one of the terror organization Hamas’s key figures Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday, videos circulated on social media, all showing a severely injured man and claiming these are recordings of the terrorist’s final moments.
However, the following day, a report on iVerify—a United Nations Development Programme and CEJ project—dismissed these claims, stating they were false. Moreover, according to iVerify’s analysis, conducted by iVerify Pakistan’s team, the injured man seen on those social media posts is an injured Gazan resident, and the footage is old.
شہادت سے چند لمحات قبل پاسماعیل ہانیہ شہید رحمہ اللہ کے آخری الفاظ pic.twitter.com/SPzwF2s41n
— Rabia Khan (@RabiaMNSKhan) July 31, 2024
To confirm that the injured man was not Ismail Haniyeh, the Pakistani team at iVerify reverse-searched the image to identify its origins.
Old footage mistaken for Haniyeh’s death
While researching, the team discovered that footage of the injured Gazan man first appeared “on Arabic news aggregator website Nabd on November 6, 2023.” Additionally, iVerify confirmed that the old footage was shared on social media with a similar caption as in Nabd, specifying the man was Palestinian.
Finally, the video claiming to show Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in his last moments does not match the actual events, iVerify’s team determined.
Haniyeh and one of his guards were killed by a projectile hitting their accommodation in Iran. The video, however, shows a bloodied man receiving medical treatment and a woman with a child - details that were not related to Haniyeh’s assassination, according to iVerify.