Fact Check: Video of model Bella Hadid supporting Israel is a deepfake

Hyderabad: A video allegedly featuring famous American model Bella Hadid declaring her support to Israel amidst the Israel-Hamas conflict is doing rounds on social media.

A premium X user shared the video with the caption, “Bella Hadid stands with Israel. Sinwar didn’t expect to get this surprise for his 61 birthday. #WeFixedItForBella. (sic)”

The viral video was tweeted on October 29 and within a time span of two days, it garnered over 27 million views, at the time of writing this article.

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the viral video is a deepfake.

The tweet on X was provided with Community Notes that confirmed that the video was made and constructed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). Bella Hadid has been vocal in her support for Palestine. The link in the notes redirected us to an article titled “Bella Hadid Says Palestine ‘Cannot Afford Our Silence’” published by Vulture. The article describes Bella as half-Palestinian.

We also found another article titled ‘All the times Bella Hadid showed support for Palestine’ on a website called Grazia.

Moreover, a simple reverse image search led us to the original video posted on YouTube on the channel of Global Lyme Alliance titled Bella Hadid’s 2016 Global Lyme Alliance New York Gala Speech on October 31, 2018.

According to the video caption, “Bella Hadid 2016 Global Lyme Alliance Gala honoree talks about what it’s like to grow up living with Lyme disease, thanks her family and friends for supporting her and tells fellow Lyme patients, ‘you are not alone.’ Lastly, she encourages the crowd by saying, ‘let’s raise some money tonight for this [important cause].” For more about Global Lyme Alliance, visit GLA.org.”

The original video is almost 5 years old and has nothing to do with the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. The video has been manipulated and edited using AI tools with a totally different voiceover to spread the false narrative of the model supporting Israel.

In order to find out the creator of the viral video, we analysed the X account of Danel Ben Namer (who posted the fake video) and found a tweet in the comments that read, “Another particularly successful project by Yishai Raziel”

Taking this as a cue, we ran a keyword search and found Yishai Raziel’s account on Instagram with many such AI-generated deepfakes with the hashtag #wefixitforyou. Raziel is apparently a voice-over artist.

The viral video has probably been deleted from his account due to a violation of community guidelines.

Lastly, we also found an Instagram post on model Bella Hadid’s Instagram handle penning down a note for people of Palestine. This confirmed that the model clearly supports Palestine.

With this, it is evident that the viral video is a deepfake.