On Oct. 21, 2023, a person managing the @Timesofgaza account on X posted a video with no sound that showed a puppy shaking in front of a bowl of food. The caption above the video read, "Scared dog shakes and refuses to eat after an lsraeli air strike on Gaza."
The video also showed an on screen caption in Arabic next to two Palestinian flag emojis that translated to, "He is still in shock from the destruction."
However, a little bit of research led us to a different conclusion about what was happening in the video.
Around five days before it was uploaded to X, the video appeared on a TikTok account named @chudung0044, as one X user pointed out in a reply. That upload of the video did not include any captions about Israel or Gaza.
This same TikTok user appeared to post a variety of content in at least hundreds of clips per week, indicating that they simply concentrate on reposting other users' potentially viral content. In other words, the video of the puppy may not have originated on the @chudung0044 account. We have yet to find an earlier upload of the same video or more clips of the same puppy.
Unlike the repost to X by @Timesofgaza, @chudung0044's TikTok video featured audio. That audio appeared to be the clip's original natural sound of an offscreen cat meowing mixed with a music track that was only identified under the video in Vietnamese as "nhạc nền - contenvip." Additional videos of content unrelated to the puppy that were posted by @chudung0044 featured music from Russia, Brazil and other countries, meaning that the music didn't necessarily mean it had originated in Vietnam.
Further, in the TikTok version of the video, there appeared to be Japanese letters at the top of the frame. Those letters were not visible in the cropped clip that was reposted by @Timesofgaza to X.
The same video of the shaking dog was also reposted to X on Oct. 22 with a Japanese-language caption. It's possible that the video was recorded in Japan or that it was captured by people who speak Japanese and reside in another country.
こんな風に優しく食べさせてもらったことがないから、ありがとうの言い方がわからないワン?☹️ pic.twitter.com/9eIOVwWUEz
— アインシュタインキャット (@Kichiji1414) October 22, 2023
We reached out to @Timesofgaza on X and @chudung0044 on TikTok to ask about their posts and will update this story if we receive any further details.