A viral clip with a hidden watermark

Since October 14, a video claiming to show olive trees Israel allegedly ripped up in the West Bank has circulated on X, drawing more than 200,000 views across several posts. The clip shows bulldozers destroying trees, and pro-Palestinian accounts spread it widely.

• •The Palestinian Authority's communications team shared the video before taking it down, according to open source investigator Tal Hagin.
• •It was also posted by the Palestinian ambassador in the Ivory Coast and by the Palestinian media outlet Quds.

France 24 ran the footage through SynthID, Google's AI-image detection tool. The check revealed a watermark showing the video was produced by Gemini, Google's chatbot. Whoever made it appears to have concealed that origin: an image of a thumbs up was pasted over the bottom right corner, exactly where the Gemini watermark usually appears.

The tells inside the footage

Beyond the watermark, the clip carries anomalies typical of AI-generated video:

• •The shovel on one of the diggers seems to change throughout the video - it first appears to have spikes, then looks normal three seconds in.
• •An olive tree falls to the ground in the background before the digger strikes it.

The real destruction behind the fake

The fake clip does not mean the destruction it depicts is invented. This year's olive harvest in the occupied West Bank was marked by numerous acts of settler violence against Palestinian farmers, and Reuters photos taken in late September showed Israeli army bulldozers ripping out olive trees in Deir Nizam, a village in the centre of the West Bank.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, at least 100,000 olive trees have been destroyed, ripped out or burned in the West Bank since 2023.