Israeli soldiers’ ‘fake wound’ rumours debunked
A set of photos has been spreading all over social media in the past week. Sometimes, the photos are reposted individually. However, they all send the same message: Israel is supposedly deceiving the world into thinking their soldiers are getting wounded in Gaza by using special effects makeup.
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Faking wounds? Yes, but...
A set of photos, below, has been spreading all over social media in the past week. Sometimes, the photos are reposted individually. However, they all send the same message: Israel is supposedly deceiving the world into thinking their soldiers are getting wounded in Gaza by using special effects makeup.
Closer analysis of these photos, however, shows that none of them are recent, most were not even taken in Israel, and all of them are taken out of context.
This photo indeed shows Israeli soldiers. However, it was taken from an article published back in August 2012 - long before the current outbreak of fighting. The article was about women’s roles in the Israeli military. The photo shows an instructor who teaches a course for trauma medics. This photo was retweeted several thousand times.
This photo has nothing to do with Israel. It was first published in 2012 on a Squidoo post about the importance of using makeup artists in movies.
This photo was published in War Paint magazine last April. It shows special effects artists at work in the United Kingdom.
This last picture is the oldest: it dates back to 2010, when a young man named Adam Stafford attended a workshop about special effects in Scotland, and posted a photo on his blog.
Image manipulation is taking place on both sides of the Israel-Gaza conflict. A video that has been widely shared on Facebook, purporting to show a little girl in Gaza learning to shoot an assault rifle, was actually filmed in Lebanon in 2013.