Claim: A video shows Palestinian prisoners starved by Israel.
Fact: This video does not show Palestinian prisoners but recovering victims of substance abuse, at the rehabilitation centre “Da Haq Awaz” in Peshawar, Pakistan.
On 29 June 2024, a blue verified account on X, Dr Anisa Maria Loupis posted a video (archive) with the caption, “This isn’t Auschwitz. It’s Israel. These are Palestinian prisoners, starved by Israel”.
The 13-second-long video shows a group of men in a room. The men look fragile and in poor health with shaved heads. The in-text caption of the video, when translated from Turkish to English, reads, “Israel’s influence on Palestinian Muslims.”
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check reverse searched the video’s keyframes on Yandex which led to an Instagram reel uploaded on 26 April 2024. The video was posted by Adnan Khan, who is a video creator according to the description in his bio. The videos on his account show a rehabilitation centre, Da Haq Awaz (DHA), in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Adnan Khan is the organisation’s general secretary.
Moreover, Soch Fact Check reached out to Adnan Khan who verified to us over a call that the video was from his rehabilitation centre in Peshawar. The video was shot in the University Town Branch in Peshawar, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, he added.
According to Khan, the victims at the centre belonged to different areas of Peshawar, most of whom were surviving on the streets in a malnourished state, before they were brought to the rehabilitation centre. While some of them have been in treatment since 2023, a few of them have already left after completing their treatment at the DHA, he added.
It is important to note that this article does not attempt to fact-check the claim of whether Israel is starving Palestinian prisoners or not. There are multiple news reports by TRT, Al-Jazeera, NBC and Reuters on the abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. However, the video in on X does not show starving Palestinian prisoners and is entirely unrelated to the ongoing war in Gaza.
Virality
The misleading video on X received 280K views, 12,000 likes and 9,800 reposts. It can be seen here and here.
The video was originally shared on Instagram by @mehmtt.by and @nur.kalemi where it garnered more than 30,000 likes.
Conclusion: A post on X, claiming to show a video of Palestinian prisoners starved by Israel, is misleading. It shows victims of substance abuse at a rehabilitation centre in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Background image in cover photo: Mosab Shawer
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