Old video of a 500-year-old Torah scroll seized in Tunisia shared as being from Syria

This video is not from Syria, but from Tunisia and dates back to March 2017. 

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled the country following rebels took control of Damascus. In this backdrop, a viral video purports to show uniformed personnel uncovering a 500-year-old Torah scroll found in the basement of the Assad palace. A Torah scroll is a handwritten copy of the Torah, which is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.

Let’s check the truth.

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Fact Check- 

We started our investigation by running a reverse image search on Google, and whose results led us to a similar video uploaded on the Facebook page of Attessia TV, a general news channel in Tunisia, on 13 March 2017. It was captioned: “Treasure Torah manuscript found dating back more than 500 years.”

Moving forward, we found a YouTube video uploaded by The New Arab channel on 10 March 2017. The video shows officials sitting in front of a screen displaying the Torah scroll, followed by a video of the scroll being opened in front of them. The video was captioned: “Tunisia seizes rare Torah manuscript before smuggling it to Europe.” This indicates that the video pertains to an incident in Tunisia from 2017.

Keeping this in mind, we made further search and it led us to the Times of Israel report, dated 12 March, 2017, stating that Tunisian authorities announced over the weekend that they thwarted an attempt to smuggle a rare Torah scroll dated to the 15th century out of the country. The report further mentioned that the scroll was made of ox skin and contained all five books of the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Based on all these evidences, we can say that an old video from 2017 shared as a rare Torah scroll that was seized from Bashar al-Assad’s home in Syria.

Conclusion-

Fact Crescendo found the viral claim made along with the video to be False. The viral video shows Tunisian officials seizing a rare 15th-century Torah scroll from smugglers in Ben Arous, Tunisia, in March 2017.