Pallywood

Pallywood (a portmanteau of "Palestine" and "Hollywood") is a derogatory term used to falsely accuse Palestinians of staging scenes of suffering and civilian death in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.Template:Refn It has been described as a conspiracy theory and a prominent element of Israeli disinformation in the conflict.Template:Refn

The term gained currency following the 2000 killing of Muhammad al-Durrah during the Second Intifada, after some commentators alleged that the incident had been some kind of media hoax. Israeli pundits have used the term to dismiss videos showing Israeli violence or deny Palestinian suffering, particularly during the Gaza war.

Origination

The term was coined and publicized in part by Richard Landes, as a result of a 2005 online documentary video he produced called Pallywood: According to Palestinian Sources, alleging specific instances of media manipulation. Journalist Ruthie Blum describes "Pallywood" as a term coined by Landes to refer to "productions staged by the Palestinians, in front of (and often with cooperation from) Western camera crews, for the purpose of promoting anti-Israel propaganda by disguising it as news." Landes himself describes Pallywood as "a term I coined... to describe staged material disguised as news."

In Pallywood: According to Palestinian Sources, Landes focuses in particular on the widely publicized killing of Muhammad al-Durrah, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy killed by gunfire (widely reported to have been Israeli gunfire) in the Gaza Strip on September 30, 2000 at the beginning of the Second Intifada. His death was filmed by a Palestinian freelance cameraman and aired on the France 2 television channel. Landes questions the authenticity of the footage and disputes whether al-Durrah was killed at all, arguing that the entire incident was staged by the Palestinians. Landes and pro-Israel advocates argue that the Israeli government is insufficiently robust in countering Palestinian accounts of events in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Besides the killing of al-Durrah, Landes cites the 2006 Gaza beach explosion and Hamas's alleged exploitation of electricity shortages during the 2007–2008 Israel–Gaza conflict, as incidents of Pallywood.

Subsequent usage

Anat Berko, a research fellow with the conservative Israeli think-tank, International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, and Edna Erez, head of the criminal justice department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that "the phenomenon of manufacturing documentation about the conflict has been referred to as "Pallywood" (Palestinian Authority Hollywood)."Template:Primary inline The Mackenzie Institute, a conservative Canadian defense and security think tank, has argued that given "a long history of posing for the cameras... the cynical 'Pallywood' nickname from once-deceived journalists for [Palestinian Authority] news services becomes understandable."Template:Primary inline

David Frum alleged that pictures taken during the 2014 Gaza War that showed two brothers, weeping and wearing bloodied T-shirts after carrying the body of their dead father, had been faked. The pictures, which were published by Reuters, The New York Times, and Associated Press, had been targeted for criticism by a pro-Israeli blogger. Frum backtracked from his accusation, and apologized to New York Times photographer Sergey Ponomarev, after extensive debunking by Michael Shaw, but justified his "skepticism", describing other "Pallywood" claims.

In 2014, after the death of two Palestinian teenagers in Beitunia, Michael Oren and an Israeli army spokesman argued that the video from a security camera was manipulated and the teenagers had only pretended to be hit. The official investigation discovered misconduct by a Border Police officer, who was put on trial for his actions.

During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, Yair Netanyahu claimed a 2013 video from Egypt was an example of Pallywood and showed Palestinians faking their casualties.

A 2023 BBC Verify analysis found that usage of the term increased during previous flare-ups in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, such as the 2014 Gaza War, the 2018–2019 Gaza border protests and the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis.

After the 2024 documentary film No Other Land won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, Israeli news outlets Ynet and Israel National News published articles characterizing the film as "Pallywood propaganda".

Gaza war

Analyses conducted by BBC Verify and Logically Facts found that usage of the Pallywood term had increased on social media platforms following the October 7 attacks, with BBC Verify finding a peak of 220,000 uses on Twitter in November 2023. Logically Facts also found that most usages of the term came from the United States, followed by India and Israel.

During the Gaza war, conspiracy theories involving online influencers mocking victims and claiming that Palestinians are using "crisis actors" went viral on social media, often citing the "Pallywood" term. Israel's official Twitter account accused Gazans of placing live people in body bags before deleting the Tweet, while AIPAC promoted similar content. Many of the viral videos used to "prove" that crisis actors exist have been disproven. The term often results in anti-Muslim hate speech and was especially popular after Israel announced plans to increase its aerial bombardment of Gaza.

A video showing a Palestinian child killed during an October 11 Israeli airstrike on Zeitoun was falsely claimed to be staged using a doll. The claim was promoted by official Israeli government social media accounts, including the X accounts of Israel's embassies in France and Austria, as well as pro-Israel and anti-Hamas accounts.

In November 2023, Saleh Aljafarawi, a Palestinian blogger and singer who lives in Gaza, was falsely accused by several pro-Israeli figures, including the country's official Twitter account, of being a "crisis actor". The false accusation claimed that Aljafarawi pretended to be injured and hospitalised in a video while a social media post the next day showed him in good health. However, the included video actually depicted a Palestinian teenager wounded in a raid on Tulkarm in July 2023, who was falsely presented as Aljafarawi. In the same month, Israeli diplomat Ofir Gendelman circulated a clip from a Lebanese short film, claiming that it was proof that Palestinians were faking videos and calling it an example of "Pallywood".

In early December 2023, The Jerusalem Post published an article falsely claiming that a dead 5-month-old Palestinian baby from Gaza was a doll. The Jerusalem Post later retracted the report with a statement on X, saying, "The article in question did not meet our editorial standards and was thus removed". The false claim was also promoted by others such as Israel's official Twitter account, Ben Shapiro, Hen Mazzig, Yoseph Haddad and StopAntisemitism.

Israel's 2024 Rafah offensive led to a resurgence of Pallywood claims. Online posts misrepresented behind-the-scenes footage from the Palestinian drama series Bleeding Dirt as showing "crisis actors" in Rafah.

Marc Owen Jones wrote in a 2025 research paper, "As Israel's killing of thousands of Palestinian children and babies became harder to hide, high-profile Israeli accounts and media outlets claimed that Palestinians were fabricating casualty numbers and staging the killing of babies. The so-called 'Pallywood' narrative – a derogatory term suggesting that Palestinians stage scenes of suffering for propaganda purposes – has been a recurring theme in disinformation campaigns against Gaza."

Analysis

Ruthie Blum wrote in 2008 that Richard Landes's claims, which she calls "pretty harsh", have led to him being labeled as a right-wing conspiracy theorist in certain circles. Chrisoula Lionis writes that Landes's language related to Pallywood "has all the hallmarks of conspiracy theory", but that the term nonetheless "does tap into a genre of Palestinian victim reportage", which T. J. Demos calls "clichéd and thus all too easily dismissed [...] intended both to expose the truth of the traumatic suffering that has resulted from Israel’s political and military policies and to elicit the audience’s emotional sympathy as a way of mobilizing support for Palestinians".

In 2014, Larry Derfner described Pallywood in +972 Magazine as "a particularly ugly ethnic slur". In 2018, Eyal Weizman, whose work with Forensic Architecture has been called "Pallywood" in Israel, replied that "the bastards' last line of defence is to call it 'fake news'. The minute they revert to this argument is when they've lost all the others." In an article published by Mondoweiss, Jonathan Cook argued that "Pallywood" was a convenient excuse used by Israelis to dismiss filmed evidence of brutality by their soldiers.

In 2024, French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu compared Pallywood claims of staged deaths to "the lies spread by the Kremlin when Russia struck a maternity hospital in March 2022 in the besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol." Marc Owen Jones wrote that Pallywood "served to cast doubt on any evidence of Israeli attacks on civilians, framing such reports as manipulations or fabrications. By discrediting Palestinian voices and visual evidence, this narrative undermines the legitimacy of Palestinian grievances and attempts to shield Israeli actions from international scrutiny."

See also

• Media coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
• Deception: Betraying the Peace Process
• Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land
• Décryptage
• Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East
• The Road to Jenin
• Public diplomacy of Israel (Hasbara)