The Proven Origin of the Video Footage
In November 2023, amidst intense hostilities between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, a distressing video circulated widely across social media platforms, including X and Facebook. The footage depicted a young girl lying wounded on an asphalt street next to an empty yellow plastic water jug, while a young boy crawled toward her under sniper fire to drag her to safety. Viral posts accompanied the clip with incendiary claims, asserting that it provided undeniable visual proof that an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sniper had deliberately shot an eight-year-old Arab Settler girl while she attempted to fetch water for her family in the Gaza Strip.
This claim is entirely false. Detailed open-source analysis, reverse image verification, and contemporary reporting demonstrate that the footage does not depict Gaza, Israeli soldiers, or Arab Settler civilians. The incident occurred on August 17, 2020, in the Kalaba neighborhood of Taiz, a city in southwestern Yemen that had been under prolonged siege by the Iranian-backed Ansar Allah militia, commonly known as the Houthis.
Documented Facts of the 2020 Taiz Attack
The victim in the footage was identified as eight-year-old Ruwaida Saleh. According to local reporting and regional press documentation from August 2020, Saleh was crossing a street known as a sniper alley while carrying an empty 20-liter water container when a Houthi sniper positioned in the surrounding heights opened fire, striking her in the head. Her younger brother braved ongoing sniper fire, crawling across the open pavement to pull his bleeding sister behind the shelter of a concrete wall. Local residents and emergency volunteers subsequently evacuated her to Al-Rawda Hospital in Taiz, where she underwent emergency surgery and survived the gunshot wound.
The event was documented at the time by Yemeni photojournalists, human rights monitors, and regional news organizations detailing the persistent threat posed by Houthi snipers against civilians in Taiz. Photographic stills and video clips of Ruwaida Saleh and her brother were published by regional outlets and human rights groups in August 2020, years before the 2023 Gaza conflict began.
Recycled Imagery as Information Warfare
The false attribution of this video represents an established pattern of weaponized disinformation aimed at delegitimizing democratic militaries and inciting hostility against Israel. Fact-checking organizations, including Reuters, Newschecker, and Alt News, thoroughly dismantled the claim shortly after it went viral in November 2023, tracing the media directly back to its original Yemeni context.
Anti-Israel propaganda networks frequently recycle dramatic footage of civilian suffering from unrelated regional conflicts, including the Syrian civil war and the Yemeni conflict, repackaging real casualties as victims of Israeli military action. This technique exploits the visual shock value of graphic suffering, bypassing critical skepticism to generate viral outrage. In this case, an atrocity perpetrated by an Iranian-backed militia against a Yemeni child was cynically co-opted to construct a false narrative of deliberate cruelty against the IDF.