Video of boy passing food through wall is from 2012 documentary, not Gaza | Fact check

Andre Byik, USA TODAY
·2 min read
22

The claim: Video shows teen delivering food through Egypt-Gaza border wall

A Feb. 2 Instagram video (direct link, archive link) shows a boy passing food to another person through a small opening in a concrete wall.

"Egyptian teen made a hole in the boarder wall to deliver bread to starving G@zans (sic)," the video's caption reads.

The Instagram post was liked more than 700 times in three days. A similar post was also shared widely on X, formerly Twitter.

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Our rating: False

The video is miscaptioned. It doesn't show Egypt's border with the Gaza Strip. The clip is from the 2012 documentary "Infiltrators" and shows food being passed through a wall between Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Video from 2012 documentary about crossings from West Bank

While humanitarian aid groups have raised concerns about food shortages in the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, the Instagram video does not show aid being delivered through Egypt's border with the Palestinian territory.

Instead, the video, which is from the 2012 documentary film "Infiltrators," shows a boy passing sesame bread through a concrete wall between Jerusalem and the West Bank, according to a USA TODAY review of the film, which is available on the streaming service Istikana.

The documentary was directed by Khaled Jarrar, and it "chronicles the daily travails of Palestinians as they seek routes through, under, around and over a bewildering matrix of barriers erected by Israel in the West Bank/Jerusalem area, including the 7-meter-high wall," according to a summary provided by the Boston Palestine Film Festival.

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In a 2018 paper examining Jarrar's work titled "The intimacy of infrastructure: vulnerability and abjection in Palestinian Jerusalem," researcher Hanna Baumann described the scene as showing two young boys "smuggling" food from one side of the wall to the other and "proudly announcing that they have pressed 1,000 rings of bread through a small drainage hole." The paper includes an image of the scene.

The Instagram user who shared the video did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Video shows West Bank barrier, not Egypt-Gaza border wall | Fact check