Graphic video from Sweden falsely shared as ‘Israeli police beating Palestinian child’

Videos shared false claims continued to flood social media as the war in Gaza entered its second year, sparked by an unprecedented attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023 to which Israel retaliated with a bloody attack on Palestinian territory. A recent post criticizing Israel was shared repeatedly around the world along with a graphic video and a false claim that it showed an Israeli police officer strangling a Palestinian child. In fact, the circulating clip predates the Israel-Hamas War and shows an incident in Sweden in 2015.

Warning: graphic video

“An Israeli police officer sat on the body of a Palestinian child and strangled him during the protests against the American embassy in Jerusalem on Saturday. The child suffocated and eventually died,” reads part of the Thai subtitles in the shared video. on Facebook on November 11, 2024.

It shows a man in a bright yellow vest pressing the boy’s face down.

The boy is shown raising his index finger reciting the Islamic Shahada creed which states that he believes in Allah and accepts the Prophet Mohammed as a messenger of God.

The post came as the war in Gaza continued, triggered by a Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 that resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, most of them civilians, according to AFP figures from Israel’s official statistics (link archived).

The army also captured 251 hostages in the Gaza Strip. Some had been killed. Of those, 97 are still in prison, and 34 are confirmed dead but their bodies are still in Gaza.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed more than 43,700 people in Gaza, according to figures from the Hamas-run health ministry. The UN is looking for reliable statistics.

Video it was also shared with similar false claims by social media users from Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Australia and Romania.

The comments show that many users believe the post.

“I can no longer tolerate what Israel has been doing to my Palestinian brothers and sisters,” wrote another.

“Look at what the most evil Zionist nation has done to Palestinian children,” said another.

There have been several protests in Israel following the outbreak of war in Gaza, as Israelis pressured their government to do more to protect hostages (links saved).

But AFP has not received official reports about a Palestinian child killed by an Israeli police officer during a protest near the US embassy in Jerusalem.

Furthermore, this video has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was previously discredited by AFP after it was circulated with false claims in 2019 and 2023.

Swedish video

A reverse image search on Google using the keyframes of the video revealed that it was actually filmed in Sweden.

A high-quality version of the clip was previously published on YouTube by Swedish newspaper Sydvenskan on 9 February 2015 (archived link).

Its Swedish-language title translates as: “Guard hits nine-year-old’s head on the ground.”

The same newspaper also reported on the incident on the same day (archived link).

Below is a screenshot comparison between the fake post (left) and Sydvenskan’s YouTube video from 2015 (right):

An AFP journalist who is fluent in Swedish analyzed the Sydvenskan video and found that people watching could be heard saying in Swedish “That child” and “How old is he?”

At the beginning of the video, the guards can be seen wearing bright vests with the Swedish words “Ordnings Vakt” or “civil service representative” on the front and back. This uniform is usually worn by security guards who assist the Swedish police.

Below is a screenshot from the YouTube video with the words highlighted by AFP:

The child of Morocco

AFP also contacted Jens Mikkelsen, one of the journalists who reported on the incident in Sydvenskan newspaper (link saved).

In an email dated November 3, 2023, Mikkelsen confirmed that the video came from an event he was covering and said the incident took place in the Swedish city of Malmö.

“Yes, this is the guy I wrote a lot of stories about,” Mikelsen told AFP.

Mikkelsen named the boy Amin and that he was born and raised in extreme poverty in Morocco before running away from home at the age of 12 and ending up in Melilla, a Spanish enclave on Morocco’s northern coast.

“He spent several months every night trying to catch a boat to Spain until he finally succeeded. Together with his friends, he traveled by train and bus, then he rode a bicycle to Sweden,” said Mikkelsen.

Another journalist Katia Wagner, who published a book about Amin and other Moroccan boys living on the streets of Stockholm, also reviewed the video (links are here and here).

Wagner told AFP by email on November 6, 2023: “That’s really ‘Amin’ in that video. I met him after the incident in Malmö, when he was in a shelter, and I stayed in touch with him for a while.”

AFP contacted Swedish Social Services and the Migration Agency for information about the boy but they did not respond.

The incident was reported by France24 on February 11, 2015, who said two private security guards were under police investigation after the incident (link saved).

According to a news site report Local Swedentwo guards did not face charges (archived link).

AFP has also debunked false information related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.