What was claimed
Images show Egyptians throwing plastic water bottles filled with food into the sea towards Gaza.
Our verdict
Some images depicting this are not real and were made using artificial intelligence. However, there are other genuine videos of people doing this.
Images which appear to show people in Egypt throwing plastic bottles filled with food into the sea in the hope they will reach Gaza are not real, and were made using artificial intelligence (AI).
One post is captioned: “Baby formula, rice, and flour — an initiative by Egyptian youth who put some food in bottles and threw them into the sea, hoping it would reach #Gaza. #GazaStarving”.
The post includes a picture of a group of men wading in water to drop food-filled bottles into the sea, alongside two images of bottles floating on the water. One of the bottles has Arabic writing on it which according to Google translates as: “The people of Egypt to Gaza”.
Although there have been reports of Egyptians throwing bottles of food into the sea amid reports of widespread starvation in Gaza, the images in some viral posts claiming to show this are not real.
Emmanuelle Saliba, Chief Investigations Officer at GetReal Security, a company which uses forensic techniques to identify malicious synthetic content and detect AI and deepfakes told us the images were “AI-generated and pretty poor ones”.
Clues that these images are AI generated include the thumb in the foreground of the first image, which bends unusually around the bottle it is holding. As we’ve explained before, AI often struggles with creating realistic hands and fingers. The bottles in the sea are also distorted, while the features of the men in the background are very blurred and hard to distinguish.
Ms Saliba also noted that “some of the water bottles are floating on top of the water, defying the laws of physics”.
During breaking news events it’s important to check whether images and videos are genuine before sharing them on social media. Our recent blog delved into what clues to look out for if you suspect something may have been created with AI.
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 missing context because these images are not real and were made using artificial intelligence.
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