A video of Jordanian Queen Rania Al Abdullah condemning Hamas and extending support to Israel is a deepfake created by an Israeli Instagram user.
BOOM found that in the original video, Queen Rania slammed the West for failing to condemn the high civilian death toll in Gaza caused by Israeli airstrikes.
The video is being shared on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok claiming Queen Rania has an important message.
In the viral video, Queen Rania appears to be saying, "Ladies and Gentlemen, in light of disturbing new evidence, I now recognise the horrific acts committed on October 7 by Hamas. The brutality by Hamas terrorists is utterly condemnable. Our sympathies lies with the victims families and Jordan standing with Israel is ready to combat extremism and work towards regional stability."
FACT CHECK
A search for Queen Rania Israel Palestine led us to recent news reports about her interview to CNN International where she "accused Western leaders of a glaring double standard for failing to condemn the deaths of civilians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza".
The Guardian reported that she made the comments in a recent interview to CNN news anchor Christiane Amanpour and said, "The people all around the Middle East, including in Jordan, we are just shocked and disappointed by the world’s reaction to this catastrophe that is unfolding. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a glaring double standard in the world."
Using this as a keyword, we ran a search and found the full interview on CNN's verified YouTube channel uploaded on October 25, 2023. In the interview, Queen Rania condemned the attacks on Gaza and also called out global leaders for their support towards Israel. Nowhere in the interview does she say that Jordan stands with Israel as being claimed in the deepfake video.
CNN also published a text story on October 25, 2023 about the same on their site with the headline. "Queen Rania of Jordan accuses West of ‘glaring double standard’ as the death toll rises in besieged Gaza"
We further noticed that the viral video had the text "Here you go Queen Rania. Fixed it for you". A search for this led us to a Twitter video uploaded by a verified X account Yishay Raziel, an Israeli musician. Raziel had uploaded the same viral video with the text, "Here you go @QueenRania. Fixed it for you" and the hashtags, "#AI #aifix #queenrania"
We found that Raziel had uploaded the same video on his Instagram first and the same had been taken down by the platform for violating community guidelines. He put up a post complaining about the same and that he would be sharing his content on Telegram instead.
We also found that Raziel had uploaded more such videos of celebrities including Egyptian presenter Basma Wahba and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Türkiye claiming they were supporting Israel; all of them manipulated using aritificial intelligence applications.
BOOM has previously debunked another deepfake video made by Raziel of celebrity model Bella Hadid supporting Israel.