Fact-Check | Viral Fake Video Claims Israeli Generals Captured

A fake video circulating on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) falsely claims that Hamas has captured Israeli generals. According to Poligraf, on October 8, coinciding with the early hours of Hamas militants' attack on Israel, an anonymous user on X shared a video showing several soldiers pulling handcuffed men from an SUV, claiming that Hamas was capturing Israeli generals. Despite the account having very few followers, thousands of users viewed, shared, commented on, and quoted the post. The post falsely states: 'Several high-ranking Israeli generals were captured by Hamas.' In reality, this video was shared by the intelligence service DTX of Azerbaijan on October 5 to show the arrest of three former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh. Poligraf reports that the handcuffed men in the video were three former officials from Nagorno-Karabakh - Bako Sahakyan, the president, Arkadi Ghukasian, the foreign minister, and Davit Ishkhanyan, the speaker of the parliament - who were arrested following Azerbaijan's attack on the Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh on September 19. Despite the presence of the Azerbaijani flag and the DTX emblem on the soldiers' uniforms, this video was circulated on social media after Hamas's attack on Israel on October 6, accompanied by the false claim that Hamas was capturing Israeli generals. The fake post garnered over a hundred thousand views, and although many commenters pointed to the Azerbaijani flag as evidence of the video's misinformation, many accepted the video as reality. Social media users noted that it had been viewed over a million times, labeling the post as fake. Reuters also investigated the false claims of the video. In addition to Poligraf's report, Persian-speaking users on social media had reported the video's falsity from the very first hours of its release. The backlash against the video's falsity intensified when the official Islamic Republic television showcased it as one of Hamas's victories in its news program on October 8, stating that social media users expressed happiness over the release of these images. The Fact-Nameh account revealed the falsity of this news, stating that the news network on October 9 aired images of arrests in Azerbaijan that had no connection to Israel and Gaza, introducing them as 'high-ranking Israeli generals captured by Hamas soldiers.' An Instagram user named Haleh Vardi also referred to the news program as a 'news blunder' and evidence of deceiving the public. Despite repeated reports from users, the content remains accessible on X. This article was prepared using Poligraf's report and the Voice of America's fact-checking project.