Images of people setting bottles of food adrift towards Gaza are AI-generated
As UN agencies warned that Gaza is slipping into famine, social media users shared images falsely claiming they show Egyptians throwing bottles filled with beans, rice, or other dry food into the sea, hoping they will reach the Palestinian territory. Although there have been media reports of such symbolic gestures by Egyptians, the widely shared images contain visual inconsistencies indicating they were AI-generated.
“Egyptians set food adrift in the sea in an effort to help Gaza,” reads part of a Malay-language Facebook post shared on July 25, 2025.
The post continues: “In an effort to help the people of Gaza, Egyptians filled one- and two-litre bottles with dry food such as rice, beans, and lentils before releasing them into the Mediterranean Sea in the hope that they would reach the shores of Gaza.”
The accompanying image appears to show a group of people releasing plastic bottles filled with rice or flour into the sea.
Screenshot of the false Facebook post captured on August 7, 2025, with a red X added by AFP
The image was also passed off as genuine elsewhere on Facebook and in other languages such as Italian, French, and Arabic.
A similar claim surfaced in a Bengali-language Facebook post on July 27, 2025 with an image of several bottles filled with food and notes floating in water.
“May Almighty’s divine power deliver this to the hungry people of Gaza,” reads the caption.
Screenshot of the false Facebook post captured on August 7, 2025, with a red X added by AFP
The image also circulated elsewhere on Facebook, and some users appear to believe the picture is genuine.
One user wrote, “Hopefully it reaches the people of Gaza…”
“Thank you.. may Allah bless you for your efforts,” another commented.
The pictures circulated online as Palestinians scrambled for basic supplies after Israel imposed a near-total blockade on March 2.
UN agencies warned that Gaza was “on the brink of a full-scale famine”, while the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said the Palestinian death toll in the nearly 22-month war had topped 60,000 (archived link).
The war was sparked by Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, the majority civilians, based on an AFP tally of official figures.
Israel began allowing a small trickle of aid to enter the densely populated territory in late May — having imposed a total blockade in March after ceasefire talks broke down — and started a series of “tactical pauses” while allowing deliveries from aid trucks and airdrops in Gaza.
Although there have been media reports of a genuine symbolic initiative launched by “Egyptian citizens horrified by the images of famine”, the images circulating online contain visual inconsistencies indicating they were AI-generated (archived here and here).
Visual inconsistencies
An analysis carried out using the Hive image verification tool on the image of people dropping the bottles into the water concluded that there was a 99.9 percent probability that these visuals were made by AI.
Screenshot of the misleading post taken on Facebook on August 7, 2025 (left) and the result of the Hive tool (right) with colored boxes added by AFP
The image also features a hand with a distorted thumb in the foreground, fully filled bottles floating improbably on the sea which defies the laws of physics, and people all facing the same direction unnaturally — hallmarks of AI-generated images.
While there is no foolproof method to spot AI-generated media, identifying watermarks and visual inconsistencies can help, as errors still occur despite the meteoric progress in generative AI.
The plastic bottles in the second falsely shared image also appear to float unnaturally on the water’s surface, while the size of the items contained in the bottles appears larger than the opening of the container.
Visual inconsistencies of the false video highlighted by AFP
AFP has debunked other posts of the Israel-Gaza conflict that falsely presented AI-generated images and videos here.
