Does a video in which a crowd of people can be seen lying on a field in sleeping bags show Palestinian civilians at the Gaza-Egypt border, in the context of evacuations related to the Hamas-Israel conflict in October 2023? No, that's not true: The same video was posted on social media in August 2023, thus predating the ongoing conflict. Its caption indicated that the footage showed young people in Lisbon, Portugal, during World Youth Day, a global Catholic gathering in which participants met the pope.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on October 15, 2023, with the text overlay (translated from Romanian to English by Lead Stories staff):
Humanitarian tragedy, Palestinian civilians at the border with Egypt. 🤲😢🤲
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Oct 17 10:35:32 2023 UTC)
A reverse image search performed by Lead Stories on October 17, 2023, led us to an identical video posted on August 6, 2023, on Facebook (archived here) and YouTube (archived here).
"Foi assim que o milhão e meio de jovens pernoitou em #Lisboa #Lisboa2023 #JMJ2023 #Jmj2023Lisboa," reads the caption of one post, or "This is how a million and a half young people spent the night in Lisbon," translated from Portuguese with Google Translate.
#JMJ2023 and #WYD2023 hashtags refer to the 2023 World Youth Day event, held in Lisbon from August 1-6, 2023. It is a weeklong Catholic gathering of young people from all over the world who celebrate their faith and meet the pope that typically concludes with the Adoration and Mass during an overnight camping event. According to news reports, an estimated 1.5 million pilgrims packed a field in Portugal's capital to secure a spot for the evening prayer and to camp out overnight.
Other Lead Stories fact-checks on the Hamas-Israel conflict are here.
