On July 3, 2026, an X account claiming to belong to a doctor and tailor in Gaza — “Dr. Mostafa Project” — posted a photo of a man in Israeli military uniform holding up a small pink sock. The caption read:
“An Israeli soldier in Gaza holds up the sock of a Palestinian girl after killing her, filming himself smiling, after writing in his post (in Hebrew): ‘My new hobby: smelling the sock of a 5-year-old girl twice a day for 4 months.'”
The account presented this as a direct translation of the soldier’s own words, but provided no link to the original post it was supposedly quoting.
The post exploded. It received over 1.3 million views, 13,000 likes, and more than 8,700 retweets — including one from The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, who used it to call Israeli soldiers “terrorists.”
The same post has been shared by other anti-Israel accounts across Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok, racking up shares on every platform.
The Truth
The photo is real. The story attached to it is fabricated.
It originated from an Instagram story posted in early 2024 by an Israeli paratrooper named Liran, around 31 years old. He wasn’t holding a dead girl’s sock — he was holding his own daughter’s. Deployed and missing her, he photographed himself smelling the sock as a small, human moment of homesickness. The Hebrew caption in the original post refers to his own child. There is no murdered girl, confession, or crime.
The manipulated version shows clear signs of tampering. Replies to the viral post itself point out unnatural artifacts, garbled or inserted text, and details that don’t hold up — including a “Greater Israel” patch on the uniform that IDF soldiers do not wear. Other circulating versions swap in different soldiers entirely while keeping the identical caption, a pattern consistent with a recycled disinformation template rather than a single genuine incident.
This isn’t new. Pro-Palestinian accounts have a long track record of inventing war crimes using AI-generated or staged imagery — a practice so common it’s earned its own name: “Pallywood.” One recurring tactic is taking ordinary, even tender photos of soldiers and recaptioning them to manufacture stories of sadism and brutality. The sock photo is just the latest entry in a script that’s become standard operating procedure in these circles.
And that’s the real story here. If the IDF were actually committing the atrocities the “Free Palestine” movement claims, there would be no need to manufacture fake ones. The fact that activists keep fabricating war crimes is itself evidence that the real ones are in short supply.
Bottom Line
This hoax is a manufactured lie built on a stolen photo of a father missing his daughter, twisted into a fake confession of child murder, and sold to over a million people as fact. That takes deliberate, calculated malice. And the fact that anti-Israel activists have to fabricate war crimes — recycling the same script with different soldiers’ faces — proves they don’t exist. “Pallywood” is a documented pattern, and this is Exhibit A.
Sources
Dr. Mostafa Project, Cenk Uygur, X, X, Reddit, Gazawood, Pallywood, Israel Foreign Ministry
