Fact Check: IDF torturing Palestinians? No, this video is from an Iraqi TV series
India Today Fact Check found that the video is actually from an Iraqi television show titled 'Beit Um Layla'.
Israel’s Knesset passed a bill that will allow military courts to impose the death penalty on Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis late last month. A video now going viral shows men in black uniforms beating people with sticks in a prison.
Sharing the video, an X user wrote, “Live footage: IDF soldiers always torture Palestinian hostages before executing them. Please don’t let us die in silence.”
India Today fact check found that this video is from an Iraqi television show titled “Beit Umm Layla”.
Our Probe
Reverse-searching the keyframes from the video led us to its longer version shared by the Facebook and Instagram pages of the Iraqi channel Al-Iraqiya on March 9. According to these posts, the video was from “Beit Um Layla”, a popular Iraqi TV series.
We found 25 episodes of the show on Al-Iraqiya's YouTube channel, shared between February 19 and March 20. The viral clip is from episode 16.
According to an Arabic entertainment website, elCinema, the TV series, released on February 18, was a socio-political drama about prisoners and their families’ psychological struggles.
Notably, India Today Fact Check debunked another viral video on April 2, claiming it showed the first execution by electrocution of a Palestinian prisoner carried out by the Israeli government under the new law. However, the video actually showed visitors trying their hand at an interactive exhibit of an electric chair at a “Ripley's Believe It or Not!” museum.
Thus, we concluded that the viral video did not show the beating of Palestinian hostages by the IDF.
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