Fact Check: Video Does NOT Show Barcelona Clash Between Pro-Palestine Protesters, Police In 2023 — It’s Footage Of A COVID Anti-Lockdown Protest
Does a video show a dispute between pro-Palestinian protesters and police in Barcelona, Spain, during the 2023 Hamas-Israel conflict? No, that’s not true: The video dates back to 2020, almost three years before the conflict arising from Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. According to contemporaneous reports, the people shown in the video were actually protesting against COVID-19 restrictions in Spain.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 17, 2023. The post included a video of protesters and law enforcement seemingly at odds. The post read:
Clashes between pro-Palestinian protesters and police in Barcelona, Spain.
#Israel #GazaAttack #GazaCity #Palestine #غزة_تحت_الركام #فلسطين_الان
This is what the post looked like on the X platform at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Oct 25 13:52:30 2023 UTC)
The video in the X post, however, is miscaptioned. Lead Stories found the video was posted online as early as November 2020, as shown in a reverse image search of a still of the video using Google (archived here).
In an article (archived here) published on November 2, 2020, by the Daily Mail, the video (archived here) was included with other clips about COVID-19 anti-lockdown protests in Barcelona. A matching video (archived here) was published on the X platform on November 1, 2020, a day earlier than the Daily Mail article. That post also claimed to show a Barcelona anti-lockdown protest.
The 2023 Hamas-Israel conflict began on October 7, 2023, nearly three years after this video was posted online.
Other Lead Stories articles on claims pertaining to the 2023 Hamas-Israel conflict are here.
This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Lead Stories can be found here.
