No, this viral video doesn’t show U.S. Marines arriving in Israel

Since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas militants, VERIFY has been fact-checking images and videos claiming to show scenes from the current war that have flooded social media.

On Oct. 26, Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said about 900 U.S. troops have deployed or are in the process of going to the Middle East region.

After that announcement, a video claiming to show U.S. Marines arriving in Israel racked up thousands of views across multiple social media platforms. VERIFY found the video posted several times on X, Facebook and TikTok.

“Hundreds of US Marines arrive in Israel,” the post from an X account says. The post, which was written in Arabic and translated into English, says that information came from Israeli media.

THE QUESTION

Does this viral video show U.S. Marines arriving in Israel?

THE SOURCES

• Original video from June 28, 2022 distributed by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS)
• The Department of Defense
• U.S. Central Command
• InVid and RevEye, video forensics tools

THE ANSWER

No, this viral video doesn’t show U.S. Marines arriving in Israel. The video is from June 2022 and shows U.S. troops arriving for a NATO training mission in Romania.

WHAT WE FOUND

On Oct. 26, the Pentagon said approximately 900 troops have deployed or are in the process of deploying to the U.S. Central Command Area of Responsibility (AOR). The AOR spans more than 4 million square miles, comprising 21 nations and stretching from Northeast Africa across the Middle East to Central and South Asia.

While there are U.S. troops headed to the Middle East, this video doesn’t show the arrival of troops in Israel. In fact, it doesn’t even show troops arriving in the AOR. 

Using InVid to isolate the keyframes in the video and RevEye to conduct a reverse image search, VERIFY was able to match this video from June 2022 distributed by DVIDS, the official U.S. military portal for distributing images and video. The video was also posted to the YouTube channel of Defense Now, which frequently publishes videos distributed by DVIDS.

DVIDS and Defense Now captions say the video shows the Army’s 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Soldiers arriving in Mihail Kogalniceanu, Romania, on June 28, 2022. 

The viral video currently being shared with claims it shows U.S. troops arriving in Israel is only 56 seconds long. The original video posted by DVIDS is over four minutes long. At the 23-second mark in the June 2022 DVIDs video and the 1-second mark in the viral video purporting to be from October 2023, you can see the same people standing in the same spot. 

The 101st unit was in Romania supporting Army V Corps to reinforce NATO's eastern flank and engage in training exercises with partners across Europe “to reassure allies and deter further Russian aggression,” the DVIDS caption on the video says.

There has been no video so far of U.S. troops arriving in Israel in the wake of the current conflict.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.