A VIDEO OF a young girl having makeup and fake blood applied, accompanied by scenes of people waving Palestinian flags, is being shared on social media alongside claims it shows Gazans are staging injuries during the war between Israel and Hamas.
This is false, and just one in a series of similar allegations; the clip is a behind-the-scenes shot from the set of a short film produced in Lebanon, which the director said was meant to artistically represent the reality of war.
“The Palestinians are fooling the international media and public opinion. DON’T FALL FOR IT,” says the caption of a since-deleted post on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, from Ofir Gendelman, the Arabic language spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister’s office.
Despite Gendelman’s deletion, the same clip has been shared on X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, in multiple languages, often accompanied by the claim that it was part of a supposed phenomenon dubbed “Pallywood” — a portmanteau of “Palestine” and “Hollywood” used to describe videos and images of purportedly staged hardships shared to garner public sympathy.
The video shows a girl on a hospital stretcher whose injuries are being attended to by medical staff. As the clip continues with what appears to be staged protests and wartime situations, the same girl is seen receiving makeup touchups and smiling — seemingly unharmed — a scene which Gendelman went on to claim proves that Palestinians are faking injuries and evacuations from Gaza during the recent violence in the territory.
On 7 October, militants with the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas executed a cross-border raid in southern Israel, where about 1,200 people — mostly civilians — were killed and at least 240 more were taken back to Gaza as hostages.
According to Israeli figures, 138 hostages remain captive.
Israel vowed to “crush” Hamas and its army’s campaign has killed 17,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to a tally of reported deaths by AFP.
While the clip does depict fictional scenarios, it was not recorded by Palestinians in Gaza — the footage comes from the set of a short film shot in Lebanon, the director of the movie told AFP.
A reverse-image search using scenes from the clip circulating on social media leads to an 29 October post with the same footage from an account with the handle @rami.jardali, accompanied by a caption in Arabic that says: “Backstage of ‘The Reality’”.
This post also tagged the page of filmmaker Mahmoud Ramzi, who describes himself as a Palestinian director living in Lebanon.
On 28 October, Ramzi shared The Reality, the completed short film on Instagram.
The movie glides between scenes including protesters with Palestinian flags, Red Crescent first responders attending to the little girl’s wounds and a violinist playing next to the hospital stretcher, all in a single shot without cuts.
The short movie is hyper stylised and is clearly not meant to fool people into believing it is footage of an unscripted event.
Ramzi told AFP that the movie was meant to illustrate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was filmed in the southern Lebanese town of Sidon, not Gaza. He expressed “his anger” that footage from the film set was misappropriated and has shared multiple fact-checks refuting the “Pallywood” narrative.
Razmi has also posted a more recent short film to his account, which also shows hyper-stylised depictions of the aftermath of violence in Gaza.
False accusations of staging scenes of suffering with so-called “crisis actors” was a trend seen before with mass shootings in the US and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but experts have seen these types of claims skyrocket during the Israel-Hamas war.
Gendelman is not the first Israeli government account to share claims of faked wartime hardships in Gaza.
The Journal has previously debunked claims that a photo of a person in a bodybag checking their phone was evidence that Palestinians were faking deaths. The photo was actually of a child in Thailand dressed a Halloween costume.
With reporting by Shane Raymond
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