In a video circulating online meant to convey the horrors of the war between Israel and Hamas, a small boy wails, his face caked in dust. Clinging to the sandwich he was eating when an airstrike razed his family’s home, he sobs for his two teenage sisters lost amid the chaos, one of whom would later be confirmed dead.
"A little boy crying for his sisters in Gaza,” reads a post accompanying the video, which was widely shared in recent weeks on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Yet the boy’s cries actually rang out hundreds of kilometers away, in Syria, nearly a decade before Israel’s bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip over the past three weeks.