Is it true that a series of photos show that a crisis actor is being used to stage a rescue scene in Gaza? No, that's not true: The photos of a little girl being rescued from a bombed building are from a 2016 attack in the Syrian city of Aleppo. They show the same little girl passing through the arms of three different men during the rescue operation. The news agency responsible for the photos has debunked false claims about them since 2016.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) on October 31, 2023. At the 44-second mark, the narrator of the video shows several images of the same girl carried by different rescuers. In comments (translated from Japanese to English by Lead Stories staff), he states:
There's something off about the children being saved. All the photos depicting children being saved from rubble use the same child.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Sat Nov 4 01:17:42 2023 UTC)
The images shown in the video were shot in Aleppo in 2016 by freelance photographer Ameer Alhalbi and show rescue attempts at the site of a recent Syrian government attack. A little girl rescued from the debris of a building is passed from one rescuer to the next, as Lead Stories explains in its debunk.
