The Israeli Olympic team was not allowed to wear their yellow “Bring Them Home” pins at the Olympics so they spelt out the phrase in the water during practice, as shown in an image.
The picture was taken in November 2023, and shared by the Israeli artistic swimming team in a post that made no mention of the Olympics.
A post shared more than 14,000 times on Facebook features an image of swimmers spelling out ‘Bring them home now!’ in a swimming pool. The caption claims: “The Israeli Olympic team was not allowed to wear their yellow ‘Bring Them Home’ pins at the Olympic games.
“So they decided to spell it out (during practice) for the entire world to see it!”
But this picture isn’t from the Paris Olympics as the post implies—it was actually shared on 19 November 2023 by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and described in the post as “a beautiful tribute by Israel’s national artistic swimming team”.
The Instagram account for the Israeli artistic swimming team also shared the image on the same day, detailing how 10 female athletes had taken part in the photoshoot.
The phrase “bring them home now” refers to a campaign of the same name calling for the release of Israeli hostages taken during the Hamas-led assault in southern Israel on 7 October.
Part of the Instagram post’s caption (translated by Google) says: “The athletes demanded through the messages to pass a message: ‘Like the whole country, we are also waiting and hoping that all the kidnapped will return home quickly.
“‘We decided to film this tribute in hopes of raising awareness of the crimes against humanity committed against Israelis and against citizens from many countries.’”
The post makes no mention of the Olympics or of athletes being banned from wearing “Bring them home now” badges.
It’s unclear whether the Israeli team was specifically banned from wearing ‘Bring them home’ badges. We contacted the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for comment, and will update this article if we receive a response.
Under Olympic rules all athletes are barred from wearing anything that could be considered a political demonstration.
Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, which sets out the rules developed by the IOC, says “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.
Misleading images are some of the most common forms of misinformation we see online. It can be difficult to keep track of what you can trust, but for some tips on verifying information yourself you can read our guide.
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 the implied claim that the image was taken at the Olympics is false.
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