'Selfie' from Palestinian outrunning Israeli soldiers is fake

This selfie of a Palestinian supposedly outrunning two Israeli military personnel has spread like wildfire on social networking sites. It’s easy to understand why: Anyone who has the time to take a selfie while being chased by gun-toting soldiers has to be fairly gutsy. But, as you might expect, it’s fake.

The original tweet posted on February 2.

It was first posted on the Twitter account of a Palestinian rapper and then retweeted a whopping 12,000 times. Internet users called it ‘priceless’, and most who shared seemed pretty convinced it was real.

But even if the photographer – rapper Tamer Nafar – is indeed Palestinian, the photo itself comes from a film shoot and was effectively just a joke. As for the so-called ‘soldiers’, they’re also Palestinian. Journalist Lisa Goldman made the remark that, frankly, the soldiers definitely weren’t wearing “regulation shoes”.

Another photo of the same scene was posted on the Facebook page of the rap group Tamer Nafar.