The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has added a black band of mourning to its logo to commemorate the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
Not true. The agency has used a black band on its logo since at least October 2023, a year before Mr Sinwar’s death.
Claims that the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has added a black band to its social media profile to commemorate the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar are circulating online.
One post on X, formerly Twitter, viewed more than 323,000 times, is captioned: “UNRWA has put a black band across its profile image to grieve for Sinwar. Just in case it was unclear what the UN is.”
Posts on Facebook likewise attribute the black band to the organisation “mourning” or “commemorating” Mr Sinwar, who was killed by Israeli forces on 16 October 2024 in southern Gaza.
While it is true that several of the agency’s official social media accounts and its website have a black band across the logo, this predates Mr Sinwar’s death by a year.
Using internet archiving tool the Wayback Machine, Full Fact found the black band was in use on UNRWA’s X account since at least 19 October 2023. It was also there a month before Mr Sinwar’s death on 7 September 2024.
The communications director for UNRWA said the black ribbon was added to the logo “to pay a symbolic tribute” to team members killed in Gaza.
Misinformation spreads quickly during breaking news events and can be difficult to contain. It’s important to make sure you check something is genuine before you share it on social media. To find out more, check out our toolkit.
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 UNRWA has used a black band on its logo since at least October 2023, a year before Yahya Sinwar’s death.
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