Following the collapse of the ceasefire on March 18, the Israel-Palestine conflict has intensified, leading to severe humanitarian and infrastructural crises in Gaza.
In the above context, an image of an injured girl has gone viral. The image is being shared with the caption suggesting that the girl was injured amid the Israel-Palestine conflict.
A social media user shared a caption that reads, “I have heard that you don’t feel pain. Come, let me take you to Palestine.” (Translated from Hindi)
SouthCheck found that the claim is false. The image is old and from Syria.
On a Google reverse image search, we found that the same image was uploaded by a website, New Republic, on October 15, 2015. The image was shared with a caption that reads, “Abd Doumany’s photograph of a wounded Syrian girl at a makeshift hospital. Abd Doumany/AFP/Getty Images”
The article was titled ‘What Photographs from the Syrian War Do and Don’t Tell Us’ and it examined the limitations of war photography in conveying the complexities of the Syrian conflict. It focused on the image of Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian child whose death symbolised the refugee crisis, and suggested that while such photographs evoke global empathy, they often fail to convey the complex realities of the Syrian conflict.
We further found that the same image was uploaded by The Atlantic. The caption associated with the image read, “A wounded Syrian girl stands in a makeshift hospital in the rebel-held area of Douma, east of Syria’s capital of Damascus, following shelling and air raids by Syrian government forces on August 22, 2015. At least 20 civilians were killed, and another 200 wounded or trapped in Douma, a monitoring group said, just six days after regime airstrikes killed more than 100 people and sparked international condemnation of one of the bloodiest government attacks in Syria’s war.”
The incident was also reported by Al Jazeera on August 23, 2015. The report associated with the news suggested that on August 23, 2015, the Syrian government airstrikes targeted the rebel-held suburb of Douma near Damascus, resulting in at least 34 deaths and over 200 injuries. The attacks caused multiple buildings to collapse, with ongoing rescue efforts to retrieve individuals trapped under the debris. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that five children were among the fatalities. These strikes occurred shortly after a previous deadly assault on a Douma marketplace, which had drawn international condemnation for the high civilian casualties.
Therefore, we conclude that the viral claim is false.
