In a Fox News interview about the Israel-Hamas war, Sen. Ted Cruz said “literally from within minutes of when this horrific attack began on Oct. 7, the Biden White House has been telling Israel, do not retaliate, cease-fire, stop, do not kill the terrorists.” But the Texas Republican has thin support for his claim.
At least 29 children have been identified by international authorities as having died in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. But a video, citing a post deleted by the World Jewish Congress, has been circulating online falsely suggesting that children didn’t die in the attack in Israel.
An online video shows Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing a 2021 military rally commemorating the triumph over Nazism in World War II. But an Instagram post sharing the video falsely claims Putin is shown announcing “help to Palestine” in the current war between Israel and Hamas.
Greta Thunberg recalled in a 2022 BBC interview how she began her environmental activism. But a recent video shared on social media deceptively alters the audio from that interview, making it appear that Thunberg called for the use of eco-friendly military weapons and “vegan grenades.” The altered video originated on a site that labeled it as satire.
Posts on social media are spreading the baseless claim that the ruler of Qatar has “threatened that if the bombing of Gaza does not stop, he will cut off the supply of gas to the world.” The country’s government gets most of its revenue from energy exports, and there’s no record of Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani making such a threat.
Since fighting broke out between Israel and Hamas militants on Oct. 7, misinformation about the war has circulated online. But a widely viewed and shared video supposedly correcting what the video calls “three lies about Palestine” and “atrocity propaganda” also gets some of the facts wrong.
An Instagram post misleadingly claims President Joe Biden is “funding every angle of this conflict” between Hamas and Israel. The U.S. does supply military aid to Israel, but it has supplied only humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people in Gaza, not military aid to Hamas.
An international judicial panel working with the United Nations’ AIDS agency issued recommendations in March on laws related to sexual conduct, including consensual sex between adolescents. Social media posts misrepresented the recommendations, with one falsely claiming, “UN wants to decriminalize sex between minors and adults.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy predicted that if Russia’s invasion of his country is successful, it will invade nearby NATO countries, triggering a war involving the U.S. military. Some conservative commentators misleadingly claimed that he’d called upon the U.S. to “send their sons and daughters to war for Ukraine and potentially die.”
President Joe Biden said in April 2022 that some of the funding in a Ukraine aid package that Congress later overwhelmingly approved could be used to pay pensions for Ukrainians amid the ongoing war with Russia. That is not a new development, as several viral tweets have misleadingly claimed in recent days.