On one side of the split-screen video, a young man lies injured in a hospital bed. A red banner across the top of the frame reads “Yesterday.” On the other side, under a green banner reading “Today,” a similar-looking man walks through rubble in Gaza.
"I'm now walking in a neighborhood where there were houses. There are no houses anymore," he says.
The post on X, formerly known as Twitter, claims the side-by-side videos show the same person. It accuses him of faking his injuries, only to be "miraculously healed" and walking around just a day later.
But the videos actually show two different people, according to fact checks from multiple media outlets. One is a Palestinian teenager who lost his leg this summer during an Israeli raid in the West Bank. That video was originally posted to TikTok in August.
The other is a Palestinian social media influencer in Gaza who has been documenting the conflict since October.
The conflation of the two individuals is a prime example of a "crisis actor" trope: the false claim that, for propaganda purposes, people are pretending to be victims of tragedies — in this case of Israel's war in Gaza, which Palestinian health officials say has killed more than 14,000 people.
"It is a means by which you blunt those narratives or the reality on the ground," said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit that studies extremism. "You discredit them off the bat."
The...
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