A video showing a tank exploding is viral online with the false claim that it shows Islamist militant group Hamas attacking an Israeli tank. BOOM found that the claims are false, the video predates the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict and is taken from the trailer of a video game called 'Squad'.
The Israel-Hamas conflict began on October 7 after the latter launched an unprecedented attack into Israel from Gaza. The conflict has killed at least 9,061 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis in almost a month. Evacuation efforts have begun in the region after the Rafah border crossing into Egypt was opened. According to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, 7,000 international passport holders will be evacuated from Gaza via Rafah.
Several clips from warfare and combat video games have emerged online since October 7, falsely connecting them to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Read BOOM's fact-checks here and here.
The 8-second viral clip shows a tank exploding while a soldier is walking towards it. The video is being shared with Urdu captions that can be roughly translated as, "The scene of the destruction of an Israeli tank in a Hamas attack."
(Original text in Urdu: "حماس کے حملے میں اسرائیلی ٹینک کی تباہی کا منظر")
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
The clip is also viral on Facebook.
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FACT CHECK
BOOM found that the claims are false; the clip is from the trailer of a video game called Squad and predates the Israel-Hamas conflict.
We broke the viral video into key frames using InVid and ran a reverse image search on Google. This led us to a post on Weibo, a Chinese video and blogging website that resembled the viral video. The post was shared on December 11, 2022, months before the Israel-Hamas conflict began and the caption, translated from Chinese read, "Hard core! The animated picture of the direct war between the Chinese and American armies."
The first 8 seconds of this clip were an exact match to the viral video.
Click here to view.
Here is a comparison between the viral video and the original video from Weibo.
We also found that an end card from the footage carried information about a video game, Squad and its latest update.
Taking a cue from this, we ran a keyword search on YouTube for Squad 4.0 and found a video titled 'Squad: Red Star Rising Update Trailer' shared on December 7, 2022 by the game's channel. The portion from 0:08-0:15 was an exact match to the viral video.
The description detailed how the game's latest update included a squad from the People's Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party.
According to the website of video gaming platform Steam, Squad is a first-person shooter video game "that provides authentic combat experiences through teamwork, constant communication, and realistic gameplay." The game is developed by Canada-based Offworld Industries.
