By: Ankita Kulkarni
October 19 2023
2014 video of people chanting ‘Gaza is cemetery’ shared amid Israel-Hamas war
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Screenshots of the viral claim. (Source: Instagram/Screenshot/Modified by Logically Facts)
Fact-Check
The Verdict Misleading
The viral video is from a documentary that shows an Israeli far-right group protesting against an interfaith marriage.
Claim ID 1384dfee
What is the claim?
Amid the ongoing Hamas-Israel war, a 17-second viral video claims to show Israelis dancing and chanting “Gaza becoming a cemetery for children.” The video shows a group of people jumping and waving Israeli flags while singing songs, whose translation in the subtitles reads, “Gaza, Gaza, Gaza is a cemetery! There's no school in Gaza because there are no children left in Gaza! They are lefties. You’re an extinct species. An extinct species.”
An Instagram (archived here) user who shared the video wrote, “Israelis sing and dance a song about Gaza becoming a cementary for children. These people are going to love the #GazaGenocide (sic).” The video is also viral on X, formely Twitter (archived here), and TikTok (archived here) with a similar claim that Israelis were seen celebrating the death of children in Gaza amid the ongoing war. Other archived versions of the similar posts can be viewed here and here.
Social media posts circulating online. (Source: X/Facebook/TikTok/Modified by Logically Facts)
However, the video shows snippets from a documentary shot in 2014 that shows a group of people protesting against an inter-religious marriage held in Israel in 2014.
What are the facts?
We found the visuals are from 2014 and show a Jewish far-right group protesting against the wedding of a Jewish woman and an Arab man. A reverse image search of a screenshot from the viral clip led us to a YouTube video posted by the channel ‘Disregarding Gaza’ on March 16, 2015. The viral visuals can be seen at the timestamp 3:01 to 3:06 and again from 3:38 to 3:54 minutes mark.
The video's description details, “A short documentary that examines the absence of Gaza and the Palestinians from the Israeli mainstream media and 2015 elections.” It adds that filmmakers Tamar Glezerman and Arianna LaPenne shot the documentary during Operation Protective Edge, which refers to Israel's military operation in the Gaza Strip in July 2014 that killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians and at least 500 children.
The documentary showed Lehava, a far-right Jewish supremacist organization that opposes association between Jews and Arabs, holding protests against the wedding of a Muslim Arab citizen of Israel and his bride, a Jewish Israeli woman.
Speaking to Logically Facts, LaPenne said, "I can absolutely confirm that this is eight years old and not recent. And this is a specific far-right extremist Israeli group protesting against the inter-religious marriage - not representative of all residents of Israel, obviously." She also confirmed that the group raised slogans, as heard in the viral video.
We found a report published by BBC News on August 18, 2014, which mentioned that hundreds of people were protesting outside the reception hall in Rishon LeZion opposing the inter-religious marriage of Morel Malka and Mahmoud Mansour. BBC noted that Mansour sought a court order to stop the protest, but the Lehava group was granted permission to conduct protests 200 meters from the wedding hall. The report also added that four Lehava group members were arrested during the protest.
Reuters, too, reported on the incident and mentioned that the protesters shouted, “Death to the Arabs in a sign of tensions stoked by the Gaza war.”
The verdict
The viral video shows members of a far-right Jewish group in Israel singing and mocking the death of people in Gaza during demonstrations held against an inter-religious marriage in 2014. It is unrelated to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war of 2023. Therefore, we have marked the claim as misleading.