Does a photo show an empty classroom in Gaza where none of the students are alive today? No, that's not true: The photo was taken in Afghanistan, not Gaza, and shows an empty classroom of students who died in 2021 in a bomb explosion. The blast killed 85 people, with the majority being schoolgirls in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) published by @hristo.11111 on January 19, 2024, with the caption (translated from Bulgarian to English by Lead Stories staff):
Filthy Jewish freaks and Satanists
The text in the middle (translated from Russian to English by Lead Stories staff) read:
🙏🙏🙏😪😪
A school class in Gaza, there is no one left alive from that class...
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jan 24 06:48:44 2024 UTC)
The picture shown is not related to the current conflict between Hamas and Israel or to a class in Gaza. A reverse image search (archived here) on January 24, 2023, using Google Lens found the same photo on articles on the Human Rights Watch (HRW) website. Various publications from 2021, as shown here (archived here) and here (archived here), can be found with the same picture.
According to information in another article (archived here) on the HRW website, published on July 2, 2021, and featuring the same photo, the classroom shown is at the Sayed ul-Shuhada Girls' School in Kabul, where on May 8, 2021, a car bomb explosion (archived here) killed 85 and injured 147. The photo can also be seen in an article (archived here) by The Associated Press published on July 26, 2021.
