A social media propagandist posted a photo of an American child who is alive and well, with a caption claiming the toddler was a Palestinian killed by Israelis.
By: Batya Jerenberg, United with Israel
A Palestinian supporter from Egypt posted to Twitter Thursday a picture of an adorable young girl, accusing Israel of having killed her in Gaza the day before.
The only problem – the toddler is not dead, not Palestinian, and not even from the region, reported the israellycool.com website Friday.
Abdullah Alsaafin tweeted the picture alongside two others showing debris from inside a child’s room, saying, “This baby, Bayan abu Khamash, 2 years old, was killed last night along with her pregnant mother when an Israeli rocket hit their house in Gaza Strip town of Der elbalah.”
He was referring to the series of retaliatory strikes the IAF made on Gazan military targets after Hamas shot 180 rockets and mortars at Israel’s south on Wednesday, during which a young mother and child were accidentally killed.
He was not alone in focusing on the unintentional deaths rather than on its cause of Hamas terrorism against the Jewish state. Israel’s foreign ministry even had to make a formal complaint against Britain’s BBC News for having a “deliberate misrepresentation of reality” in its headline about the incident, which ignored the Hamas actions that precipitated the Israeli strike.
But as a pro-Israel, mock Mossad Twitter account pointed out, the child Alsaafin chose to depict was not the victim.
“Look at this girl! How could we do such a… wait… it’s a random picture of a girl they took from Instagram,” it said, and posted the link to prove the allegation was completely false.
The real name of the smiling girl is Elle Lively McBroom, the very alive daughter of an Instagram star, Austin McBroom, who has 4.8 million followers while posting vlogs constantly about his family through the ACE Family Channel.
The caption accompanying the May 28th picture of the bright-eyed youngster says, “Happy Birthday Elle Lively McBroom❤ Your getting so old🤧 I hope you have the best second birthday!”
Fake news such as this emanating from Palestinians or their supporters is old news, really, as a quick search on Google shows.
People may remember graphic images of supposed child victims of the Israeli Protective Edge operation in Gaza in 2014, who were in reality injured in Syrian or even Iraqi battles years earlier, and staged footage spread around the world of seemingly wounded Palestinians being carried on stretchers who then get up and walk away when their directors turn off their cameras.
The last time an Israel-related photo with a totally false caption made the internet explode was just two months ago. Pro-Palestinian activists posted a four-year-old picture of a woman in full IDF uniform and accused her of “executing” a Gazan medic on June 1 during one of the series of mass riots at the Gazan border instigated by Hamas as a cover for attempted infiltrations into Israel.
But the soldier had been released from the army 2.5 years before the incident. Within a couple of days, however, the false claim had been shared and re-shared tens of thousands of times and translated into six languages. The woman, her family and friends received hundreds of hate messages and death threats as a result.