On the onset of December, during the renewed hostilities in Gaza, the family of five-month-old Palestinian infant Muhammad Hani al-Zahar experienced a tragic loss.
In the wake of this heartbreaking event, images circulated online showing Muhammad’s mother and grandfather cradling his lifeless body outside a hospital.
These poignant scenes, however, were met with skepticism on social media, where numerous users incorrectly asserted that Muhammad was not a real child but a doll.
This misinformation gained further traction when the Jerusalem Post, a prominent Israeli newspaper, published an article featuring an image of Muhammad in a post-mortem state, erroneously claiming it as evidence of him being a doll.
Following significant criticism, the Jerusalem Post retracted the article and acknowledged the mistake on X (formerly Twitter), citing unreliable sources for the report.
In a separate incident, a video of Israeli siblings Rotem Mathias, 16, and his sisters, Shakked and Shir, became widely shared.
The video emerged after the tragic death of their parents, who were killed by Hamas gunmen on October 7th while seeking shelter in their home near the Gaza border.
The footage, which included edited excerpts from the siblings’ interviews with American media outlets ABC and CNN, was misleadingly used to promote the false narrative that they were “crisis actors” pretending to grieve and struggling to suppress laughter during the interviews.
In the digital landscape of the Israel-Gaza conflict, the proliferation of social media has become a battleground for divergent perspectives, with denial of atrocities and human suffering taking center stage in the online discourse.
One prominent term contributing to this phenomenon is “Pallywood,” a portmanteau of “Palestine” and “Hollywood.” Proponents of this term allege that staged or fake footage, featuring Palestinian “crisis actors” posing as genuine civilian casualties, is regularly disseminated online to shape public opinion and mislead global media. According to a BBC Verify analysis, the term “Pallywood” has experienced a significant surge in mentions on X over the past decade.
During previous escalations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2014, 2018, and 2021, “Pallywood” consistently peaked at either 9,500 or 13,000 mentions in a single month on X. However, after the Hamas attack on October 7, the term reached a peak of 220,000 mentions in November.
The analysis also revealed that among those sharing the term “Pallywood” on social media platforms, including X, Facebook, and Instagram, were Israeli officials, celebrities, and popular bloggers from Israel and the United States.
Conversely, supporters of the Palestinian cause lack a singular term to deny atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 in Israel. However, posts making such claims routinely garner millions of views on social media, falsely asserting that Hamas did not kill civilians on that day or exaggerating the scale of civilian casualties. Some go as far as making unfounded claims that most victims were actually killed by the Israel Defense Forces, not Hamas.
Experts specializing in reconciliation efforts express concern that the viral dissemination of disinformation, which denies the suffering of the other side, can be dehumanizing. They fear that this may have lasting impacts on the prospects of rebuilding relations between the affected communities in the long term.
“The biggest risks, I think, are the erosion of trust and the erosion of empathy,” said Harriet Vickers, programme lead at the Tim Parry and Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace, a charity that supports victims of conflict, political violence and acts of terror.
“It undermines the ability to even begin approaching reconciliation efforts.”
She added that false narratives and dehumanising rhetoric can also “have a profound effect beyond those that are directly impacted by violence, and can actually further the hurt that is being done to those individuals”.
False narratives about “crisis actors” or atrocity denial are not new to those who study disinformation.
The concept of “crisis actors” in particular – that is people who pretend or are paid to act out some particular tragedy or disaster – has been popular among promoters of conspiracy theories for years.
It was notoriously used to allege that parents of dead children in the Sandy Hook school shooting in the US were somehow faking their personal tragedies.
In the past few years similar viral claims were posted about the killing of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, and victims of the war in Syria.
But the volume of dehumanising rhetoric posted during this war has surprised even those who deal with such content on a daily basis.
Eliot Higgins, the founder of the investigative website Bellingcat that has covered the wars in Syria and Ukraine in recent years, says the volume of disinformation in the current Israeli-Gaza war is “unique to this conflict”.
“I’ve seen the kind of same intensity of toxicity and vile responses and disinformation, the way they treat women and children and that kind of stuff, with Syria, with Ukraine and so many different topics – just there are more people doing it,” he told the BBC.
Mr Higgins added that because many people have had very strong opinions about either side of the conflict for years, “there are more people who are sharing stuff because it is resonating with them emotionally”.
“They don’t really care if it’s true or not, it just feels true to them.”
Back in November, a video showing makeup and fake blood being applied to a child actor’s face was posted on X by Ofir Gendelman, the Israeli prime minister’s spokesperson to the Arab world.
“See for yourselves how they fake injuries and evacuating ‘injured’ civilians, all in front of the cameras. Pallywood gets busted again,” Mr Gendelman said in a post that was viewed millions of times before being deleted.
The video was, in fact, behind-the-scenes footage from a 45-second Lebanese film made in tribute to Gazans and posted online in October.
Director Mahmoud Ramzi, who took to Instagram to personally debunk the false claim made about his film, told the BBC that in the end, the misinformation might have backfired, with the controversy helping his film reach a much bigger audience.
The BBC approached Mr Gendelman for comment but he has not responded.
Others have expressed concern for the real people who find themselves in the middle of online disinformation wars. James Longman, the ABC correspondent who interviewed Rotem and his sisters, says watching Rotem recount the death of his parents brought him and his cameraman to tears.
“He was in tears, his sister was in tears, their grandfather, who was with us. Our cameraman, the hospital porters, the nurses, the doctors, and I was in tears. I mean all of us sitting there listening to what he had to say,” he told the BBC.
“It was extraordinary to hear him say it, to watch his reactions as he explained what had happened.”
Mr Longman said he was shocked when he saw false claims about the siblings being shared online and took to X to debunk it. His post was shared widely, and led to at least one of the viral messages about the siblings being subsequently deleted by the person who posted it.
“But it doesn’t make it any less horrible for Rotem’s family,” Mr Longman said