Claim: Video shows Palestinian prisoners that are held captive by Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza.
Fact: The video shows scenes from a rehabilitation centre in Peshawar.
On 1 July 2024, X user @josevico4 posted a video on X (archive), showing frail, shirtless men, with a caption in Spanish. The user wrote [translated from Spanish via Google Translate]: “They are not prisoners of Auschwitz, it is not the German Nazi Holocaust. They are Palestinian prisoners kidnapped by Israel, it is Israel’s Nazi Holocaust.”
The post claims that the video shows the poor conditions of Palestinians that were captured by Israel amid the on-going war.
13 seconds into the video, we see a clip sourced from Sky News, showing Noa Argamani, an Israeli woman who was captured by Hamas and released in June. The following text is superimposed on this part of the clip: “And so the ‘Israeli’ prisoner return rescued.”
The video previously surfaced in July 2024 with the claim that it shows Palestinian prisoners and was consequently debunked by Soch Fact Check. However, we noted the video was trending on X again in October.
Palestinian Prisoners
Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
Since the start of the war, Israel has held several hundred Palestinians captive, in overcrowded facilities. Released prisoners reported abuses, including “waterboarding, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, dogs set on them, and other forms of torture and mistreatment.”
A United Nations report from September 2024 noted severe gender-based and sexual violence based on “20” cases of male and female captives, in 10 prison facilities, most notably in “Negev prison and Sde Teiman camp for male detainees and in Damon and Hasharon prisons for female detainees.”
Some 53 Palestinian detainees have died in custody since 7 October 2023, who were held in detention “arbitrarily” and “incommunicado.” The UN report noted the detainees are mostly “men, women, children, doctors, journalists and human rights defenders.”
The New York Times’ recent investigation (archive) revealed that the Israeli army used Palestinian detainees as human shields in Gaza to protect themselves while using them to snuff out bombs in buildings and tunnels used by Hamas.
Israel has captured more than 14,000 Palestinians between 7 October 2024 and July 2024, according to the UN’s reports. It holds nearly 10,000 inmates in prisons as of October 2024, according to HaMoked, an Israeli rights group assisting Palestinians “under the Israeli occupation.”
Fact or Fiction?
On 16 October, Tal Hagin, an open-source intelligence analyst wrote (archive) in the comments that the video was from “a rehabilitation center in Pakistan.”
“These aren’t Palestinian prisoners kidnapped by Israel as the video implies,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter). He shared two images in the post: the first, a screenshot of an Instagram image that matched keyframes from the original video, and the second was a screenshot of the Instagram page of user “adnankhandha” who had originally uploaded this footage. The user’s bio said he is associated with the rehabilitation center “Da Haq Awaz,” in Defence Housing Authority (DHA), Peshawar.
Soch Fact Check analysed user “adnankhandha’s” Instagram account, who uploaded this video on 26 April 2024 (archive). Hashtags alongside the post, “#reelsdahaqawaz #reels #reelshospital #reelsinstagram #viral” further confirm the footage was shot at the rehabilitation centre.
When the claim surfaced in July 2024, Soch Fact Check had spoken to Adnan Khan, the General Secretary of Da Haq Awaz, a rehabilitation centre for men, women and children struggling with drug and substance abuse. Khan confirmed that the video was shot at this rehabilitation centre in Peshawar.
Additionally, Misbar, a fact-checking organisation, also debunked this video when it surfaced in late June 2024 and claimed to show Palestinian prisoners.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, concludes the video does not show Palestinian prisoners held captive by Israel.
Virality
The X post was viewed 515K times and liked 11K times.
It appeared on Facebook (archive) with hashtags “#GAZA #HELP #TURKEY” in May 2024.
Conclusion: A video does not show Palestinian prisoners held captive by Israel. It is from a drug rehabilitation centre located in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Background image in cover photo: The New York Times
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