Israel and Hamas have been at war since Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds hostage on Oct. 7. Hamas is a militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, where more than 2 million Palestinians live.
After Hamas attacked, Israel retaliated with an aerial bombardment campaign, mobilized hundreds of thousands and troops and moved ground forces closer to the border fence that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), since Oct. 7, more than 41,000 housing units have been destroyed in Gaza and 1.6 million people have been displaced. The latest data from the Hamas-led Ministry of Health says 11,078 Palestinians have been reported killed since Oct. 7, the OCHA report said.
Recently, a photo went viral claiming to show a woman climbing the stairs in a destroyed housing unit in Gaza. The woman is holding a child’s toy car.
“You CANNOT BREAK the Palestinian spirit,” a caption on one X post says. That post has more than a million views.
THE QUESTION
Is the viral image of a woman climbing stairs in a bombed building from the current Israel-Hamas war?
THE SOURCES
THE ANSWER
No, a viral image of a woman climbing stairs in a bombed building isn’t from the current Israel-Hamas war. It was taken in Syria and has been online for at least three years.
WHAT WE FOUND
The viral photo has been online since at least 2020 and was taken in Homs, a town in Syria, by Iranian photojournalist Hassan Ghaedi.
Using RevEye, a reverse image search tool, VERIFY found the photo on the website for the Siena International Photo Awards (SIPA). The photo, titled “Mother” received the top prize in 2020 in the “Remarkable Artwork in Documentary and Photojournalism” category.
“Homs, Syria's third largest city, had been involved in war for four years. A mother, who returned home after the end of the conflict, found her child's toy car in their destroyed house,” the caption on SIPA’s website says.
VERIFY also found the photo on Alamy, a website that sells high-end stock images. According to that page, June 16, 2012, is listed as the date the photo was taken. VERIFY hasn’t been able to independently confirm the date the photo was taken, but did reach out to Ghaedi. We did not hear back at the time of publication.
In 2011, Syrian citizens protested against the government and President Bashar al-Assad demanding democratic reform, according to a global conflict tracker published on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) website. After the government responded to the protests with brutal force, the protests escalated into full-scale war between anti-government rebel groups and the Syrian government.
The war continued for more than a decade, with an estimated 600,000 people killed since the war started. As of October 2023, the Assad regime has regained control of most of the country but still faces pockets of resistance across the country, the CFR’s tracker says.
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