Unrelated Footage Viral as Assassination Attempt of the Palestinian President!

The recent unrest in Israel and Palestine has been ongoing for over a month. As the situation continues to escalate, there have been reports of alleged assassination attempts on the President of Palestine in the past week.

Social Media Post

On November 7th, an extremely graphic video was circulated along with a statement claiming to show an attempted assassination of Mahmoud Abbas, the President of Palestine. The incident reportedly resulted in one casualty from the security force.

We found the mentioned video and statement being circulated on both Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter).

Source | Archive

Source | Archive

The video in question received high engagement, with over 3.3 million views. As a result, we decided to further analyze it.

Fact-Check

We started our investigation using the Invid – We-Verify tool to analyze the keyframes from the video. Then, we used the Reverse Image Search feature to find the source of the video. We found articles from The Palestine Chronicle and France 24 that have verified and debunked the claims mentioned above.

According to the France 24 website, the video in question was posted on November 7, while the police raided a drug dealer in the Jalazone refugee camp located near Ramallah in the West Bank. Khabar24, a local media outlet in Palestine, has shared the clip and reported the incident on their Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/khabar24.net/posts/1572915646445892/

In the next few hours, Talal Dweikat, the spokesperson for the Palestinian Security Forces, released a statement concerning the incident. According to the statement, "Six members of the Palestinian Security Forces were injured, with one of them suffering serious injuries, during a raid on a drug trafficking suspect.”

See the statement from the spokesperson for the Palestinian Security Forces below.

Here is an analysis done on the viral video by France24 explaining the facts.

Source: FRANCE 24 English

Summary

The video circulating on social media, which claims to show an assassination attempt on the President of Palestine, is misleading. It has been confirmed that the video actually shows an incident where the Palestinian Security Forces apprehended a group of drug traffickers in the Jalazone refugee camp, located in Ramallah, West Bank.

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