Jerusalem (AFP) – Months after he was discharged from hospital, his right leg amputated, Mohammed Zendiq saw his image swirling online in a vicious disinformation campaign downplaying the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war.

Modified: 14/11/2023 - 05:07

3 min

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The 16-year-old is one of many civilians on both sides caught in a haze of disinformation since Palestinian militants smashed through the highly militarised border on October 7, triggering an Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza.

The information war running in parallel with the deadly conflict on the ground has seen conspiracy theorists accuse ordinary Palestinians and Israelis of being "crisis actors" –- feigning injuries and deaths to garner sympathy and demonise the other side.

An old video that shows Zendiq wounded in a hospital bed was falsely identified in multiple social media posts as depicting a Palestinian blogger who has chronicled the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

The posts peddled the false narrative that the blogger had staged the injuries one day while walking around seemingly unharmed soon after.

"Palestinian blogger 'miraculously' healed in one day from 'Israeli bombing,'" an Israeli influencer said in one post viewed millions of times on X, formerly Twitter.

"Yesterday, he was 'hospitalised,' today, he is... walking like nothing happened."

But the posts conflated images of separate people, AFP fact-checkers determined, using reverse image and keyword searches.

One was Zendiq, who lost...

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