Video of crowd chanting at Al-Aqsa mosque predates Iran’s attack on Israel

Iran’s unprecedented drone and missile attack on Israel has generated a flurry of false claims on social media. Among these, several posts claimed that a video showed Palestinians gathered at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem cheering Iran’s attack. But the claim is false: AFP Fact Check found that the clip was already online days before the attack.

“Palestinians celebrate at Al-Aqsa Mosque after hearing the news of Iran’s attack on Israel,” reads a post published on X on April 13, 2024.

Shared more than 3,400 times, the video shows a large crowd with the golden dome of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque visible in the background. The audio features chanting in Arabic.

The account that shared the video has a history of posting content critical of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza.

The X accounts of state-owned Russian news agency Sputnik, Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), and several others (here, here, and here) shared the same claim. It was also shared in Spanish on Facebook.

Iran attacks Israel

Late on April 13 and into April 14, Iran carried out an unprecedented direct attack on Israel, using more than 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, in retaliation for a deadly April 1 air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus (archived here).

In Tehran, crowds gathered at Palestine Square to cheer the attack on Israel (archived here).

However, the claim that the video shows a crowd at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque cheering Iran’s attack on Israel is false.

Video predates attacks

To verify the claim, AFP Fact Check took a screenshot of the clip and carried out a reverse image search.

We found that the clip had been posted on social media days before Iran’s April 13-14 attack. A Turkish-speaking X account published the footage on April 5 (archived here).

“Jerusalem is on the rise”, reads the translated caption of the post.

A Turkish account on Instagram published the same clip on April 6 (archived here)

A TikTok post (archived here) published on April 5, which shared a higher definition version of the same clip, included hashtags such as “#FajrFriday”, “#LastFridayofRamdan” and “#Jerusalem”.

This suggests that the video was taken on the last Friday of the recently concluded Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The ninth lunar month of the Islamic calendar lasted between March 10 and April 9, 2024.

AFP reported that some 120,000 people visited the Al-Aqsa mosque on Friday, April 5, 2024, to mark Laylat al-Qadr, which means “The Night of Destiny” (archived here).

The night commemorates the moment the archangel Gabriel first appeared to Prophet Mohammed and began revealing the Koran.

An AFP journalist in Lebanon noted that the audio track featured in the clips was taken from an older video of a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Jordan, published on YouTube in 2017 (archived here). AFP Fact Check previously debunked another claim using the same audio track (here) in Arabic.

The chant can be heard eight seconds into the YouTube video.

“Labbyaka ya Aqsa”, meaning “We obey you O Aqsa”, is a common chant heard during religious gatherings or pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the Middle East.

The Al-Aqsa mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, is a site sacred to both Islam and Judaism in the Old City of Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem that has long been a lightning rod in Israeli-Palestinian relations.