Does a video on social media show Russia and the Russian military intervening on November 5, 2023, to help Gaza? No, that's not true: The footage, which is said to show Russian intervention in Gaza, is a combination of a video from Syria taken no later than 2022 and a video from a stock video website where it was uploaded in 2010.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) published by @martinharizanov75 on November 5, 2023.
The French text overlay reads translated by Lead Stories staff:
Russia 🇷🇺 strongly intervenes to help Palestine. 🇵🇸
5 November 2023
The Bulgarian text at the bottom of the video translated by Lead Stories staff reads:
Russia 🇷🇺 intervenes to help Palestine. 🇵🇸
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Nov 9 08:15:56 2023 UTC)
The stock video dating from 2012 with the description "amphibious assault" from which the footage was taken and cropped can be found using the watermark visible on the second part of the footage shown in the claim. The original stock video can be found while searching on the iStock website for videos with similar visual elements as found in the footage. The video was uploaded to the iStock website for sale on August 23, 2010. An exact match of the TikTok footage with that of the iStock video can be seen from the 25-second mark to the 53-second mark of the TikTok video.
The origin of the rest of the TikTok video can be found by searching for different stills from the footage. The Lead Stories team's reverse Google image search, archived (here), was conducted on November 9, 2023, and matching footage can be found in a video posted on YouTube on May 30, 2022. According to the description, the video shows Syria. A match of the footage shown in the first part of the TikTok video can be seen from second 3 to second 21 mark of the YouTube video.
Furthermore, a photo by Delil Souleiman, AFP, shown in an RT article dated August 27, 2020, as well as another photo published in the Russian media 'TopWar' article on December 24, 2020, completely match visually with the footage of the TikTok video showing Syria, indicating that the Syria footage was shot before 2022.
There are no published press releases or news on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, according to which Russia has or will intervene and come to the aid of Gaza. No evidence or media reports from credible news sites support the claim that the Russian military intervened to help Gaza. A search performed by Lead Stories on November 9, 2023, archived (here), for a combination of words from the claim, using Google News' index of thousands of credible news sites, did not return any results.
Another similar claim debunked by Lead Stories staff can be seen here.
