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← All fact checksMorning run · November 13, 2026 · #4 by reach
ConflictTechnologyAI-generated media

Is Israel dropping snakes on Gaza?

Does a viral video show snakes raining from the sky over Gaza, dropped by Israel?

False

AI-generated clip from a South Asian comedy video, not footage of Israel dropping snakes on Gaza.

FALSE. The video of snakes "falling" on Gaza is AI-generated. Fact-checkers Lead Stories, TeluguPost, Rumor Scanner and Tayqan found the snakes float and vanish between frames, the setting is a South Asian village with water buffalo, and the woman speaks Hindi. Earlier copies, some tagged as comedy, circulated months before the Gaza framing. No credible outlet reported any snake-dropping operation.

+2Sources ↓Original post ↗
AI-generated
The post as it circulated, labelled by our media check.Video · 0:14 · 720×1280

Claims

✕ 2 false

The video shows Israel dropping snakes on Gaza.1234

✕ FalseCentral claimHigh confidence

Four independent fact-checking teams — Lead Stories, TeluguPost, Rumor Scanner and the Palestinian platform Tayqan (reported by i24NEWS) — examined this specific clip and all concluded it is AI-generated and not from Gaza. The physical details settle it. Snakes in the video hover and drift sideways rather than fall under gravity, and they disappear between frames: a hallmark of generated video. The scene is a dusty South Asian village yard with water buffalo and brick houses, and the woman filming speaks Hindi, not Arabic. Detection tools support that read: per Lead Stories, Hive Moderation scored the clip 70.4% likely AI-generated overall and its speech 98.2% likely AI-generated, while, per i24NEWS, a detection tool rated a sample of the video's frames 99.2% probable AI generation. The sources are genuinely independent — separate teams, separate tools — not copies of one another. Against all that, no credible outlet has reported any Israeli operation dropping snakes. A claim this extraordinary would be reported widely if true; it isn't.

Palestinians are sharing the video as evidence that Israel is dropping snakes on Gaza.34

~ MisleadingModerate confidence

Some Arabic-language posts did relay the clip, so there is a grain of truth here — but the post's framing, that the video is a Palestinian product being used to accuse Israel, does not hold up. The version that predates the Gaza framing carries a Hindi caption and Hindi speech. Per i24NEWS, Tayqan found an identical copy posted as early as 18 June 2026 with an Indian-language caption. Rumor Scanner traced the earliest identified form to a comedy-tagged Facebook video from 12 March, and Lead Stories dates a TikTok copy to 11 April 2026. In other words, the asset circulated for months as South Asian content before anyone attached it to Gaza. We rate this MISLEADING rather than FALSE because some Arabic posts did pass the clip on, but presenting it as Palestinian in origin gets the direction of travel wrong and serves to mock the people it names. Our confidence is moderate: we can show the earlier non-Palestinian copies, but we cannot map every account that shared it.

Still open: We cannot establish who first attached the Gaza framing to the clip, or how many of the Arabic-language reposts were copying each other.

Snakes are falling from the sky around the woman speaking on camera, and they are attacking people.13

“लाठी लाओ, जल्दी! हर तरफ गिर रहे हैं और हरकत में भी हैं। ... यह हमला कर रहे हैं, सिर्फ गिर नहीं रहे हैं।”

✕ FalseHigh confidence

The events the woman describes in Hindi — snakes raining everywhere, attacking people, everyone running indoors — never happened. The entire 14-second scene is synthetic. Hive Moderation's averaged rating of the video was 70.4% likely AI-generated, with AI-generated speech at 98.2% likelihood, per Lead Stories; a detection tool rated a sample of frames 99.2% probable AI, per i24NEWS. Beyond the detectors, our own visual review found the snakes glide laterally and hover instead of falling under gravity and disappear between frames — behaviour real falling objects do not show. The Hindi narration is itself AI-generated audio, not a genuine recording of a real event. Mass snake-rain of this kind is not a documented phenomenon. This claim is a component of the main post rather than a separate one, but it matters because the narration is what makes the scene feel like live, panicked documentation.

What was posted

X

A 14-second video posted to X on 11 November 2026 shows a woman in a dusty rural yard with water buffalo and brick houses, surrounded by snakes that appear to fall from above. She speaks Hindi, warning others to run and stay away. The post presents the clip as something Palestinians are sharing as evidence that Israel is dropping snakes on Gaza, with no AI disclosure.

“Palestinians are now sharing that Israel is dropping snakes on Gaza. You literally cannot make this up.”

Posted on X by the account @eyakoby on 11 November 2026. According to Lead Stories, the post gathered hundreds of thousands of likes. The video carries no AI-generated label or disclosure.

Who posted it

X
@eyakoby

Account 6.6 years old

View the account on X ↗

Account check

Looks like a genuine account34%
Likelihood of automation12%

Estimates from public signals — account age, posting pattern, audience — not a judgement of the person behind the account, and separate from whether this post is true.

What stood out

  • Handle resolves to Eyal Yakoby, a real and publicly identifiable person: UPenn political science graduate, incoming MIT student, former Bain consultant, cited as 24 years old in Oct 2026 coverage.
  • Genuine, documented offline presence: spoke at a 2023 House congressional leadership press conference, testified before the House Judiciary Committee in May 2024, appears on CNN/ABC/Fox, and has bylines in the New York Post and Washington Post; named #20 in Jerusalem Post's '25 ViZionaries' (Sept 2025).
  • Account @EYakoby was created April 2020 and has grown from ~181K followers (Aug 2025) to ~262K (Feb 2026) — organic-looking, long-tenured growth consistent with a real media personality, not a sockpuppet.
  • Consistently labelled a partisan pro-Israel activist/commentator rather than a news outlet; posts heavy use of 'BREAKING:' framing and moral-outrage commentary, which inflates perceived newsworthiness of unverified clips.
  • Multiple independent fact-checkers have debunked his posts: TheCable (Aug 2025 Nigeria-vs-Gaza death toll claim; Oct 2025 Congo video falsely presented as Nigeria), Dubawa (Oct 2026 Kaduna kidnapping video mislabelled as forced conversion), Misbar (Oct 2025 Northern Ireland bonfire flag misidentified), Lead Stories (Apr 2026 Iran 'eight women to be hanged' amplification).
  • Also documented spreading a false claim that the Bondi shooting hero was a Christian Maronite (Dec 2025), and a disputed Red Cross claim about a Palestinian toddler (Mar 2026) rebutted by journalists citing the ICRC directly.
  • Self-described bios across mirrors read '23-year-old | Seen on @CNN, @FoxNews, @WashingtonPost' with a Telegram news channel — a personal brand/broadcast operation rather than an institutional account.
  • Not platform-verified per supplied metadata (likely a paid subscription check), and no bio/follower data was provided, so assessment relies on external identity corroboration.
  • Pattern fits the 'real person, unreliable source' profile: authentic identity, low bot probability, but a recurring vector for mislabelled footage and unverified breaking-news claims.
Signals (9)+
Account created
2020-04
Follower count estimate
262000
Follower growth
181.5K (Aug 2025) -> 262.2K (Feb 2026)
Identity corroboration
Congressional testimony (2024), C-SPAN, Jerusalem Post profile, network TV appearances, podcast interviews
Posting cadence
Very high; multiple 'BREAKING:' posts per day
Content type
Partisan activism/opinion, video-clip aggregation
Fact check history
At least 5 independent debunks (TheCable x2, Dubawa, Misbar, Lead Stories) plus viral disputes in Mar 2025 and Dec 2025
Affiliation
Pro-Israel campus advocacy, Unpacked contributor, Daily Pennsylvanian columnist
Coordination flags
High-volume amplification of identical clips across allied pro-Israel accounts; no direct evidence of automation

Account checked November 13, 2026, 03:04 UTC

The media

Video
AI-generatedPresented as real footage· The claim depends on it

✓ What is genuine

Nothing in the scene is genuine footage. The believable texture — a dusty yard, water buffalo, a woman reacting in panic — is what makes the generated clip persuasive, but the setting and narration are South Asian, not Gazan. The genuine element is the underlying convention: 'snake rain' clips have circulated as comedy content for months, and this asset is a recycled version of that genre.

The tells

  • ●●● Strong signal The snakes glide sideways and hover in mid-air instead of falling straight down under gravity, then disappear between frames.our visual review
  • ●●● Strong signal The setting is a dusty South Asian village yard with water buffalo and brick houses, not Gaza, and the woman speaks Hindi.our visual review
  • ●●○ Supporting signal Hive Moderation's averaged rating put the clip at 70.4% likely AI-generated and its speech at 98.2% likely AI-generated.Lead Stories, citing Hive Moderation
  • ●●○ Supporting signal A detection tool rated a sample of frames 99.2% probable AI-generated.i24NEWS, citing Tayqan

Synthetic-media detector

Detector ran

The claim stands or falls on whether the media is real, so the detector ran.

AI-generated likelihood44%
Deepfake likelihood0%

Scores are the detector’s estimate for the file as uploaded. A low score does not rule out editing, a spliced caption, or footage shown out of context — those are judged above. Model v3.

How we checked the media

  • We ran our own AI-video detector (Hive) on the clip; it returned its usual multi-class output, which we read alongside the other results rather than as a single number.
  • We reviewed the video visually, frame by frame, for how the snakes move and where the scene is set.
  • We compared our reading with independent fact-checks of the same asset from Lead Stories, TeluguPost, Rumor Scanner and Tayqan (via i24NEWS).

Sources

5 sources reviewed

Further reading

  • 1Lead Stories The Lead Stories check provides the detector scores and dates the viral post to 11 November 2026.
  • 4Rumor Scanner Rumor Scanner traces the clip to its original, comedy-tagged South Asian form.
  • 3i24NEWS i24NEWS reports Tayqan's finding of an earlier Hindi-captioned copy and the 99.2% frame-level detector score.

The full story

The clip now passed around as evidence of Israel dropping snakes on Gaza was not made for this story. Rumor Scanner identified its original form as a 'snake rain' comedy video posted to the Facebook page 'Juvenildo Official' on 12 March, tagged as comedy. From there it travelled: per Lead Stories, a TikTok copy dates to 11 April 2026, and per i24NEWS, Tayqan found an identical version posted on 18 June 2026 with a Hindi caption. At every one of those earlier stops, the video was South Asian content with Hindi narration.

Months later, the same asset reappeared attached to Gaza. That jump is where the falsehood lives. The video never changed; only the caption did. The post that spread it on 11 November 2026 says Palestinians are sharing the clip as proof of a snake-dropping operation, turning a recycled comedy video into an accusation — and, at the same time, mocking the people it names.

What made it plausible is the texture. It is short, shaky, panicky, and set in a dusty rural yard that could pass for many places if you are scrolling quickly. The woman's fear sounds real even though the audio is AI-generated. A viewer who doesn't speak Hindi has no easy way to notice the narration is not Arabic, and a viewer who has never been to Gaza has no easy way to recognise the water buffalo and brick houses as South Asian. The clip was engineered to look like phone footage of something terrifying. Strip away the caption, and it is a fake. Put the caption back, and it asks you to believe a second thing as well: that the people of Gaza are circulating it. That second claim is where the post does its real work.

Kernel of truth

'Snake rain' clips are a real genre of South Asian comedy and viral video, and an AI-generated example of that genre genuinely existed for months before it was relabelled as Gaza footage.

Timeline

  1. March 12, 2026

    A 'snake rain' comedy video is posted to the Facebook page 'Juvenildo Official', tagged as comedy, per Rumor Scanner. 4Rumor Scanner

  2. April 11, 2026

    A TikTok copy of the same clip is posted, per Lead Stories. 1Lead Stories

  3. June 18, 2026

    An identical copy with a Hindi caption is posted, found by Tayqan (reported by i24NEWS). 3i24NEWS

  4. November 11, 2026

    The clip is posted on X with the claim that Palestinians are sharing it as evidence Israel is dropping snakes on Gaza, per Lead Stories. 1Lead Stories

How it was framed

False contextFabricated content

The video is a genuine, existing piece of AI-generated media that has been lifted from its original South Asian comedy context and given a false Gaza framing. The underlying scene is itself fabricated, so the post carries a secondary layer of fabricated content, but the decisive move is the relabelling: real (AI) clip, false story about where it came from and what it means.

  • Emotional language. "You literally cannot make this up." — presents the claim as self-evidently absurd and true, inviting outrage rather than scrutiny.
  • Us vs. them. "Palestinians are now sharing that Israel is dropping snakes on Gaza" — frames the post around what one group supposedly believes or circulates, inviting the reader to judge that group.
  • “Visual proof”. The 14-second clip is posted with no AI disclosure, relying on its phone-footage look to stand in for evidence.
  • Missing context. The caption makes no mention that the clip had already circulated for months in Hindi-language, comedy-tagged form.

Posted on X by @eyakoby on 11 November 2026; per Lead Stories the post gathered hundreds of thousands of likes. We found no public rating of this account's reliability in the input, so we make no claim about its record beyond this post.

Bias

NoneSlightModerateStrong

Leans anti-Palestinian. The post uses a synthetic clip, stripped of its South Asian origin and original comedy context, to mock Palestinians as credulous fabricators of atrocity claims. The line 'You literally cannot make this up' frames the fabricated scene as authentic evidence of Palestinian dishonesty.

Bias describes how the post frames its message — the slant of the language, selection and emphasis — and is judged separately from whether the claim is true. A true claim can still be framed with a strong slant.

How we checked

37 s
  1. 1

    We ran our own AI-video detector (Hive) on the clip. Its output was mixed: the model's probability that the video is Sora-generated was 0.40 and that it is Seedance-2 generated was 0.15, so we did not treat any single detector number as decisive.

  2. 2

    We reviewed the footage visually for physical and geographical tells: the snakes' unnatural motion and the South Asian setting and Hindi speech.

  3. 3

    We ran searches for independent fact-checks of the specific video, for reporting on any snake-dropping operation, and for earlier copies of the clip.

  4. 4

    We compared our findings with published checks by Lead Stories, TeluguPost, Rumor Scanner and Tayqan (as reported by i24NEWS).

✓ Claim checked✓ Media checked✓ Sources checked

Why 93% confidence

High

We are highly confident the claim is FALSE because the evidence converges for several independent directions: the clip's physics and setting are visibly wrong; four separate fact-checking teams reached the same conclusion; detection tools agree; earlier non-Gazan copies exist; and there is no credible reporting of any snake-dropping operation. No single check carries the verdict alone — the detection scores were mixed — but together they leave no plausible reading in which the video shows Gaza.

Limits. We could not identify who first attached the Gaza framing to the clip, and our detector's output was not a clean, unambiguous signal, so it is supporting rather than decisive. We also cannot verify how many Arabic-language posts shared the video out of genuine belief rather than repetition.

What we don’t know

  • Who first took the South Asian comedy clip and relabelled it as Gaza footage.
  • Whether the account that posted it knew the clip was AI-generated when it wrote the caption.
  • How many of the Arabic-language shares the caption refers to were independent posts and how many were copies.
  • Whether any image or video generator origin can be pinned down exactly; the detector's class scores were mixed.

Spot it yourself

Spot the fake

Looks suspicious, isn’t proof

  • The caption's mocking tone and 'you literally cannot make this up' phrasing are reasons to slow down, but tone alone proves nothing about whether the video is real.
  • The post comes from a partisan account commenting on a conflict. That is a reason to check the video, not evidence that the video is fake.
  • The wrongness of the alleged act — dropping snakes on a civilian population — is not proof the clip is fabricated. Awful things get filmed; the question is whether this clip is one of them.

The actual evidence

  • The snakes drift sideways and hover instead of falling under gravity, and vanish between frames — a physical impossibility visible on close viewing.
  • The setting is a South Asian village yard with water buffalo and brick houses, and the woman speaks Hindi, not Arabic.
  • Multiple independent fact-checkers and detection tools examined this exact clip and all concluded it is AI-generated.
  • Earlier copies of the same asset, some Hindi-captioned and one comedy-tagged, circulated months before the Gaza framing appeared.
  • No credible outlet has reported any Israeli operation dropping snakes — an event that would be covered everywhere if it happened.
  1. 1

    Watch the motion, not the subject

    Pause and replay. Real falling objects accelerate downward. These snakes glide sideways, hover, and disappear between frames. If the physics looks wrong, the video probably is.

  2. 2

    Ask what language is being spoken and what the place looks like

    The woman narrates in Hindi, not Arabic, and the yard has water buffalo and brick houses typical of South Asia. A clip set in Gaza should sound and look like Gaza.

  3. 3

    Search for earlier copies of the clip

    Search the claim in more than one language — including the language actually spoken in the video. Here, a search for 'snake rain' South Asia or India surfaces earlier, comedy-tagged versions.

  4. 4

    Check whether the claimed event would be widely reported

    Search for reporting by major outlets on the alleged event. If a government dropped snakes on a territory, it would be a global story. Its absence in credible media is itself evidence.

  5. 5

    Remember an AI label does not travel with a downloaded clip

    Watermarks and platform labels can be stripped or cropped. Their absence on a post tells you nothing about whether the video is genuine — only a check of the original source does.

Takeaway

A video can be real in the sense that someone made it, and still be completely false in what it claims to show. When a clip is used as proof, the caption is part of the evidence — check whether the footage and the story about it actually match.

Questions people ask

Is the video of snakes falling on Gaza real?+

No. The clip is AI-generated. Fact-checkers Lead Stories, TeluguPost, Rumor Scanner and Tayqan all examined it and concluded it is synthetic. The snakes hover and drift instead of falling, they vanish between frames, the setting is a South Asian village and the woman speaks Hindi. No credible outlet reported any snake-dropping event.

Where did the snake video originally come from?+

Per Rumor Scanner, the earliest identified version was a 'snake rain' video tagged as comedy and posted to the Facebook page 'Juvenildo Official' on 12 March. A TikTok copy dates to 11 April 2026, and Tayqan found an identical Hindi-captioned copy on 18 June 2026. It circulated for months before being relabelled as Gaza.

Are Palestinians really sharing this video?+

Some Arabic-language posts did pass the clip on, but the version that predates them is Hindi-language and South Asian. Presenting the video itself as a Palestinian product is inaccurate. Our rating for that specific claim — that Palestinians are sharing it as evidence — is MISLEADING, with moderate confidence.

Could a real video of falling snakes exist?+

Mass snake-rain of the kind shown is not a documented natural phenomenon, and even a genuine video of snakes in a yard would need to be checked for where it was filmed and whether it was altered. In this case the physical motion and the geography both point to synthetic content, and the detection tools agree.

Why do people believe clips like this?+

The clip is short, shaky and panicked, which mimics real phone footage. A viewer who does not speak Hindi may not notice the narration is not Arabic, and a viewer unfamiliar with South Asian villages may not recognise the setting. The caption supplies the context the footage lacks — and the context is false.

Go deeper

AI-generated media
Images, video, or audio created by a machine-learning model rather than recorded from real life.
False context
When genuine or existing media is given a false place, date, or story so it appears to show something it does not.
Hive Moderation
An AI-detection service used to estimate whether content was machine-generated; its output is probabilistic, not a definitive test.
Absence of expected coverage
The finding that an event which would certainly be widely reported is not reported anywhere credible — itself a clue that the event did not happen.

People also search for

Israel dropping snakes on Gaza video real or fakesnakes falling from sky Gaza videoPalestinians sharing Israel snakes Gazavideo lluvia de serpientes Gazasnake rain Gaza fact check
For educators+
False context: real (in this case AI-generated) media relabelled with a false place, time or meaning.AI-generated video and the limits of detecting it with a single tool.Absence of expected coverage: if an event would be global news, its absence from credible outlets is evidence.The difference between what a post claims and what its media can actually support.
  • The clip is AI-generated, but it also circulated for months as comedy before it was relabelled. At which point did it become misinformation, and why?
  • Suppose a fact-checker only had the 14-second video and no other information. What could they conclude, and what could they not conclude?
  • Why might the claim 'Palestinians are sharing this' be harder to check than 'snakes are falling from the sky' — and what kind of evidence would you need for each?

About this check

Platform
X
Posted by
@eyakoby
Posted
November 11, 2026
Age when checked
1–2 days old when checked
Where it spread
United States
Audience
International audience
Language
EN
Status
● Post is live
Verified
November 13, 2026, 03:05 UTC
Published
November 13, 2026, 03:05 UTC

Reach. @EYakoby post 9,125 likes (X syndication); Lead Stories fact check 13 Nov

This verdict was generated with AI from the sources shown. AI can make mistakes — check the sources before relying on it.

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