A video shows a car driving through a crowd of pro-Palestinian protesters “blocking the freeway” in Los Angeles.
This is false. The footage is from an incident at a Black Lives Matter protest which took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2020.
Warning: links in this article contain potentially upsetting footage.
A video falsely purporting to show a large car driving at pro-Palestinian protesters in California has been circulating on social media.
Posts on Facebook and what is now X (formerly Twitter) share a clip of a red vehicle towing a large trailer driving through a crowd of protestors.
One caption with the video shared on Facebook on 14 December states: “A truck cuts through a crowd of Palestinian protesters blocking a freeway in Los Angeles.”
A protest did take place in Los Angeles, California on 13 December, where people blocked a freeway and called for a ceasefire in Gaza. But the video being shared is unrelated to that event or the current Israel-Gaza conflict.
It was filmed in May 2020 during a Black Lives Matter protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma following the killing of George Floyd.
Local news in Oklahoma later reported that the District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler had confirmed no charges were to be filed against the driver.
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The 110 Freeway in Los Angeles was blocked by protesters on the morning of 13 December this year as part of a protest organised by the “IfNotNow” group calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Reports stated that California Highway Patrol officers arrested 75 people following the blocking of the highway.
Local news outlets reported “scuffles” broke out between protesters and drivers, but there is no evidence that a car drove at the protesters.
Full Fact has seen many examples of online misinformation relating to the conflict in Israel and Gaza, including a video of an ‘anti-government’ rally in Warsaw mislabelled as a pro-Palestine march, miscaptioned CCTV clips of hospital explosions in Syria, aerial footage of a bombing in Sudan and a firework accident in Istanbul.
You can read more of our work countering this type of misinformation here, as well as our guide on fact checking misleading videos relating to the conflict.
Image courtesy of Scott Gunn
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 the video actually shows an incident at a Black Lives Matter protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2020.
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