A video circulating on social media, supposedly showing a Hamas activist threatening France during the Olympic Games, is most likely a fake relayed by pro-Russian networks, according to experts and reliable sources.
In this video that has been circulating since the beginning of the week, a man, his face hidden by a keffiyeh and wearing a Palestinian flag on his chest, threatens France in Arabic. He accuses it of supporting Israel, before brandishing what looks like a head of Marianne, a symbolic figure of the French Republic, wearing a Phrygian cap, decapitated and bloody.
“The first clues we have allow us to say that this video is falsely attributed to Hamas. The investigation and investigations are continuing and the investigation does not allow at this stage to attribute it to this or that State. But it is clear that this is clearly a State intervention,” declared the French Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, on Thursday evening.
According to a reliable source interviewed by Agence France-Presse (AFP), “the first analyses point towards a Russian operation under a ‘false flag’ due to a bundle of clues” which point towards a Russian origin, an analysis shared by several experts.
A false flag attack is a ruse of war in which attackers operate under false identities or without distinctive signs to deceive opponents, observers and potentially trigger an escalation of the conflict.
In the case of this video, one of the first accounts to post it on X, called “@endzionism24,” which has since been suspended, was created in February but remained silent for several months. It became active a few days before the video was posted to share content hostile to Israel, a typical pattern of inauthentic accounts.
Furthermore, the source adds, “the video was republished on X by accounts known to be part of Russian networks and was relayed by African sites known to be exit points for Russians.”
For example, there is “@aussiecossack”, an influential pro-Russian account, notes researcher David Colon on X, a specialist in foreign interference, who also sees Russian manipulation behind this video.
Grammar mistakes
Another reliable source also points out that in the video, “the visual codes of Hamas propaganda are absent” and the man speaking makes pronunciation and grammar mistakes, according to an Arabic-speaking AFP journalist.
According to the jihadist threat analysis website Site, a senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, called the video “a montage of Zionist propaganda.”
Hamas is a terrorist organization for the European Union and the United States, and French authorities have warned of a “resurgence” of the terrorist threat.
In addition to its amplification by networks that have been designated as pro-Russian, the video, also shared in Spanish and English in particular, has been widely distributed, for example in France by the far-right polemicist Jean Messiha, but also by people defending the Israeli cause or ordinary individuals.
It also takes place in a tense political context in France. For example, the radical left MP (La France insoumise, LFI) Thomas Portes publicly called last weekend for action to make it known that the “Israeli delegation is not welcome in Paris”, attracting strong criticism accusing him of endangering people who are already particularly threatened.
On Thursday, Israeli authorities also alerted French authorities of another false flag campaign against Israelis, orchestrated by Iran.
“As part of this campaign, a group of hackers opened channels on social media where they published personal information about the members of the delegation and sent them threatening messages,” according to a statement from the Israeli National Cyber Directorate and the Culture and Sports Ministry.
“The campaign was carried out by trying to impersonate a French organization called GUD,” a very famous French ultra-right organization, Israeli authorities claim.
For several months, the Paris Olympics (which take place from July 26 to August 11) have been the subject of manipulation and disinformation campaigns, notably by pro-Russian networks, but not only.
Moscow has consistently denied carrying out such campaigns, while many Western governments have denounced these actions, which they describe as hybrid warfare.
Pro-Russian networks had already been suspected of acting under a false flag at the end of 2023 against the Olympic Games, by circulating images of graffiti drawing a parallel between the Paris Games and those of Munich in 1972, when the Palestinian organization Black September (classified as a terrorist organization by the European Union) had killed members of the Israeli delegation.
These graffiti were most likely montages, because they have never been seen in the streets of the capital, a reliable source pointed out at the time.