What was claimed
A photo shows a Palestinian girl after her house was demolished in 2003.
Our verdict
This photo was taken in Gaza and shows a young girl, but was taken in 2014, not 2003.
Facebook post claiming to show Palestinian girl who grew up to be a lecturer not what it seems
21 October 2021
What was claimed
An image shows a young Palestinian girl who grew up to be a lecturer in Canada.
Our verdict
Incorrect. The woman pictured is Iraqi, not Palestinian, and the ages of the girl and woman don’t match.
A post on Facebook shows a picture of a young girl in distress alongside an image of a woman.
It claims the young girl was a Palestinian called Sarah whose house was “demolished by the Israeli occupation” in 2003, and has grown up to be the woman pictured, a lecturer at a Canadian university.
This isn’t true.
The woman pictured is not a Palestinian woman named Sarah but an Iraqi woman named Suzan Hameed Majeed. Her photograph comes from a TED talk she gave in Baghdad in 2013, where she is described as a “daughter of Basra”.
Rather than a lecturer at a Canadian university, the caption of her TED talk video says she is “a licensed trainer in human capital development and founder of an organization dedicated to human development and generation of social values.”
And the photo of the young girl was taken in 2014 according to Agence France-Presse, not 2003, by photographer Fadi Thabet in Gaza, one year after the TED talk took place.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because neither of these images are who the post claims there are and we can find no record of a Palestinian lecturer in Canada called Sarah.