What was claimed
A video shows an interview with an Israeli woman who escaped from Hamas.
Our verdict
False. The video comes from 2017 and shows the Iraqi MP, Vian Dakhil, describing the experiences of Yazidi women captured by Islamic State.
Video shows Iraqi MP describing actions of Islamic State, not Hamas
6 November 2023
A video circulating on social media falsely claims to show an Israeli woman who has escaped “Hamas militants”.
While the woman is speaking Arabic, English subtitles show her relaying the horrific treatment of other women supposedly by Hamas.
Several posts on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) share the video with the caption: “She is an Israeli escaped from Hamas militants and interviewed by Middle East Media Research Institute Headquartered in Washington DC. Identity not disclosed by the MEMRI tv.”
However, the clip predates recent events in Israel and Gaza, and does not show an Israeli woman.
The video shows an interview with an Iraqi MP, Vian Dakhil, in 2017 by an Egyptian news channel called Extra News. It was shared on YouTube by the channel with the caption “Very special | Interview with Vian Dakhil - Member of the Iraqi Parliament” (translated using Google).
A longer version of the video was also shared by the Independent in November 2017 with English subtitles reportedly verified by Middle East Media Research Institute. This includes a sentence that explains the testimonies come from “women whom we managed to retrieve from Isis”. This line has been cut from the clip on social media, which otherwise has the same subtitles.
Vian Dakhil was formerly the only female Yazidi politician in Iraq’s parliament and has spoken publicly about the horrors committed by Islamic State against the Yazidi religious minority group who primarily reside in northern Iraq. The UK parliament has formerly acknowledged that the Yazidi people were subject to genocide by Islamic State in 2014.
Misinformation can spread quickly during significant global events and it’s important to verify information you see online.
This can be especially crucial when videos include different languages, meaning context could be lost in translation and the videos could be more susceptible to manipulation. For example, Full Fact has seen old videos of politicians, such as Russia’s President Putin and North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un, circulating with mistranslated subtitles that give the false impression the politicians are speaking about the recent conflict in Israel and Gaza.
You can read our guide to verifying misleading videos concerning the Israel-Gaza conflict here, as well as other articles we’ve written about recent events here.
Image courtesy of VOA Kurdish
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the video comes from 2017 and does not show an Israeli woman speaking about Hamas.