Radical Anti-Israel Reporters, Activists Spread Debunked IDF Shooting Video

A slew of anti-Israel reporters, media figures, and activists continue to promote a since-debunked video purporting to show the Israeli Defense Forces massacring Palestinians at a humanitarian aid site—more than a day after the footage was proven to be a hoax.

"More footage of the massacre that the IDF claims did not happen," Drop Site News reporter Ryan Grim tweeted on Sunday, above Arabic-language footage of the alleged attack on Gazan civilians.

The original video—which amassed nearly 400,000 views on X—was posted by a Palestinian who works for the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera news network, which is known to fabricate anti-Israel narratives. The BBC found on Monday that the video, which does not depict a single IDF soldier, was filmed nearly three miles from the nearest aid distribution site at an hour of day that does not align with the timing of the purported massacre. It is now believed the attack was carried out by Hamas.

Grim’s tweet, which is still live after both the BBC and IDF debunked its contents, has drawn more than 133,000 views and promotion from a network of prominent anti-Israel agitators. The group includes former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft scholar Annelle Sheline, and Raed Jarrar, a policy analyst with the anti-Israel advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now.

The false story also gained widespread traction in the mainstream media, with the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, BBC, and others relying on Hamas officials to claim that Israel gunned down over 30 civilians. Many of these outlets, including the BBC, subsequently walked back their initial reports, but not before they had spread across social media and fomented another public relations nightmare for Israel.

Grim and his Drop Site News outlet are the original purveyors of false claims that a White House National Security Council staffer previously worked for the Israeli government, an allegation that generated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and was quickly disproven by the Trump administration.

The Quincy Institute, an isolationist think tank funded by George Soros and Charles Koch that advocates for normalized relations with Iran, boosted that story and Grim’s Gaza massacre tweet.

While some social media observers informed Grim that his tweet about the events in Gaza was false, others have used it to promote blood libels about the Jewish state and its war effort.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree, anti-Semitism has skyrocketed across the globe, leading to the killing earlier this month of two Israeli embassy staffers in downtown Washington, D.C., and a terrorist attack on peaceful demonstrators this weekend in Boulder, Colorado.

An IDF spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon that misinformation about the incident in Gaza continues to spread.

"In recent hours, false reports have been spread, including serious allegations against the IDF regarding fire toward Gazan residents in the area of the humanitarian aid distribution site in the Gaza Strip," the spokesman said. "The IDF calls on the media to be cautious with information published by the Hamas terrorist organization, as proven in several previous incidents."

Findings from an initial IDF inquiry into the matter indicate that soldiers "did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the humanitarian aid distribution site and that reports to this effect are false."

These findings are consistent with the BCC’s own investigation of the video Grim, Al Jazeera, and others promoted online.

"We have geolocated the clip to a spot in Khan Younis about 4.5km (2.8 miles) from the nearest aid distribution point," the outlet reported on Monday. "The direction of shadows suggests it was filmed in the evening, not the morning, which doesn't match accounts of the Rafah shootings."

Separate reports on Tuesday that the IDF was forced to fire on several suspects at an aid site in Rafah have complicated matters.

An IDF spokesman confirmed the incident occurred and said it is being formally investigated.

"Earlier today, during the movement of the crowd along the designated routes toward the aid distribution site—approximately half a kilometer from the site—IDF troops identified several suspects moving toward them, deviating from the designated access  routes," the spokesman said. "The troops carried out warning fire, and after the suspects failed to retreat, additional shots were directed near a few individual suspects who advanced toward the troops."

The IDF says it is "aware of reports regarding casualties, and the details of the incident are being looked into."

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