AAP FactCheck: ‘Wounded’ infant photo has nothing to do with Palestine conflict
Australia’s prime news agency AAP has verified a photo of an infant purportedly injured in the Gaza conflict was taken in America…in 2019.
FactCheck is a division of AAP which publicises fake posts on social media.
THE STATEMENT
An eye-catching photo of a baby with red marks across its face has been linked to the conflict in Gaza.
The image, shared by a Facebook user to the group “Muslim post Australia”, shows a close-up of the infant and facial markings that resemble burns or scabs.
“May Allah bless this little Palestinian angel and give her fast recovery & all injured Palestinian people,” the post’s caption reads.
At the time of writing, the May 18 post had been shared more than 110 times and generated more than 750 reactions and comments. The image was also shared on Twitter, with one user claiming it showed a baby “attacked by Israel using white phosphorus bombs”. The tweet had generated more than 600 retweets and likes.
A Facebook post includes an image of a baby with red marks across its face.
AAP Factcheck
THE ANALYSIS
The photo does not show a victim of the conflict in Gaza – nor is the baby a Palestinian child. The infant is an American girl with a rare condition that leads to pronounced birthmarks.
Hundreds of people have been killed since fighting erupted in Israel and Palestinian territories on May 10, with the majority of the casualties occurring among Palestinians in Gaza. Many of the injured and dead include children, with images of the casualties shared around the world.
In a May 18 statement, UNICEF called for immediate humanitarian access to the territory after the deaths of at least 60 children and the wounding of 444 more in Gaza. Israel has denied widespread claims made on social media that it was using white phosphorus weapons, considered illegal if deployed against civilians.
However, the baby pictured in the social media posts was not a Palestinian baby injured by Israeli forces. She is actually Bianca Latino from Rockford, Illinois, whose facial markings are a symptom of the rare disorder Sturge-Weber syndrome, which caused port wine stains on her face and back.
The same image of Bianca as seen in the posts featured in media coverage in early 2019. According to a story by Caters News Agency, Bianca was diagnosed with the syndrome at three months of age, after which she had pulse dye laser treatment in an attempt to clear the marks.
That treatment temporarily left red spots that looked like “burn marks” on the baby’s skin, as seen in a videothat accompanied the article. The article and images were also picked up in April 2019 by British newspapers The Sun and Mirror.
In the articles, Bianca’s mother Deanna Latino was quoted as saying she had received cruel comments suggesting she may be an abusive mother as a result of the markings.
Ms Latino is now an ambassador for the US Vascular Birthmarks Foundation and has chronicled her daughter’s life in various YouTube videos and on a Facebook page. The YouTube video, posted in 2018, shows Bianca after her first laser treatment (3min 35sec) with red welts similar to those seen in the later photo beginning to appear.
THE VERDICT
The image featured in the post is not an injured Palestinian child as claimed. Rather, the baby is an American girl with a rare condition that causes pronounced birthmarks.
False – Content that has no basis in fact.
* AAP FactCheck is an accredited member of the International Fact-Checking Network. To keep up with our latest fact checks, follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
No apology forthcoming I suppose….someone should get onto it including on behalf of the mother.
This goes to show the vileness of social media. There are thousands of doctored photos, articles and videos that go viral around the world and are re-tweeted and spread around and distorted by keyboard warriors generating hate and even leading to violence. There is little ‘fact checking’carried out, and even when there is, irreparable damage has already been done. Recent examples of this have included photos of dead and injured children purportedly harmed by Israeli soldiers in ‘Palestine’ which were actually Syrian children, casualties of their own government’s cruelty in Damascus. The saying ‘the first casualty of war is truth’, is painfully true.