Old video from Iraq goes viral as Israeli soldiers firing at a mosque in Gaza

The video actually shows a minaret of a mosque in Iraq being shot by American troops.

A video of gunshots and smoke coming from a minaret is going viral on social media with the claim that it depicts Israeli soldiers firing at a mosque in Gaza during prayer. The users who shared the video with captions such as, “Israeli soldiers reportedly fired at a mosque minaret in Gaza during the call to prayer”.

Let’s check the truth

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Fact Check- 

We started our investigation with a reverse image search on Google and the results led us to a similar video uploaded on the verified YouTube channel of US filmmaker Michael Moore on 16 March, 2008.The video is titled “WINTER SOLDIER: U.S. Marines Fire on Mosques Unprovoked.”

The description part states, “Cpl. Jon M. Turner’s (3/8 Kilo Company, 1st Platoon, U.S. Marine Corps) testimony on March 15th, 2008 included these two videos of Turner’s squad firing on Mosques unprovoked, a violation of international law.” The video does not have a call to prayer playing in the background.

Further searches revealed that the incident was also covered in a Turkish news article from 3 March, 2008. The title of the article is “US soldier’s new game minaret percussion”. 

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Moving forward, we came across a YouTube video from September 2011. It features former U.S. Marine Jon Turner discussing his time in Iraq. In this, Turner describes an incident involving a minaret, stating, “One of the guys in the weapons company had gotten shot, and this is the way we would take out our aggression.” The viral video appears on a projector screen at the timestamp of 14:28. He adds, “For those of you who don’t know, it is illegal to shoot into a mosque unless you were taking fire from it. There was no fire that was taken from that mosque. It was shot into because we were angry.”

Thus, taking account of all these evidences, we can understand that an old video of U.S. Marines firing at a mosque in Iraq is falsely shared as footage of Israeli soldiers firing at a mosque minaret in Gaza.

Conclusion- 

Fact crescendo found the claim made along with the viral video to be False. The video actually shows a minaret of a mosque in Iraq being shot by American troops and it dates back to 2008.