Turkish journalist Erem Şentürk mistakenly tweeted a photo of a Kurdish boy suffering from phosphorus burns, attributing the injuries to Israeli military action against Palestinians. The tweet was deleted when it was revealed that the child was actually Kurdish, and that the injuries were caused by Turkish forces in an alleged white phosphorus attack in 2019.
Şentürk’s tweet read, “Israel is responsible for this. They used white phosphorus, a banned weapon, to burn these children,” adding that the Israeli defence minister had even “gloated about it on live TV”.
However, the child in the photograph was identified as 13-year-old Mohammed Hamid Mohammed (now 17), who had been treated in a Kurdish hospital in northern Syria. The boy’s injuries were not inflicted by Israeli forces, but were the result of the 2019 alleged Turkish phosphorus attack.
Kurdish journalist Diliman Abdulkader clarified the situation. “This was not done by Israel, but rather by Turkey”, he said. “Turkey used chemical weapons against Kurdish children in Rojava in northeast Syria”.
The director of a northern Syrian local news outlet, North Press, also weighed in on the matter, shedding light on the child’s background. “This is the child who was attacked by Turkish forces with white phosphorus weapons in Serêkaniyê (Ras al-Ain) in 2019 when they occupied the city and displaced its original inhabitants,” his tweet read. “Today, some Turkish journalists are distorting the facts and publishing old photos of the child, claiming that Israel targeted him. This child is currently living with hundreds of thousands of displaced people in the Washokani camp in Hasakah after fleeing the Turkish occupation in Serêkaniyê”.
The Washokani camp in the Hasakah (Hesekê) countryside is one of the civilian settlements affected by recent Turkish attacks against Kurdish-led regions in Syria. The camp is currently home to around 16,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Serêkaniyê who were forced to flee their hometown in the wake of Turkey’s 2019 military operation.