Does a video on social media show "thousands of U.S. Marines landing in Israel," to assist Israeli forces in the fight against Hamas? No, that's not true: The video predates the 2023 Hamas-Israel conflict. It is from June 2022 and features the arrival of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division in Romania, to support the V Army Corps mission to strengthen NATO's eastern flank and participate in exercises with partners across Europe.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published by @gregrim on TikTok on October 26, 2023. It stated (translated from Russian by Lead Stories staff):
Thousands of US Marines landed in Israel
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Dec 1 12:58:12 2023 UTC)
This video of the U.S. military descending from a plane has been widely circulated in the Russian-language segment of TikTok, for example, here (archived here), here (archived here) and here (archived here).
The video, though, is not related to the current Hamas-Israel conflict and predates it by more than one year.
A Russian-language sticker with the name of the Telegram channel "Leviatan" is visible on the TikTok video. According to the description of the channel on Telegram, it is a source of information on what is happening in Israel. However, the video could not be found on that account at the time of writing and may have been deleted.
A reverse image search (archived here) on Yandex conducted by Lead Stories on December 1, 2023, revealed that the video shown in TikTok was filmed more than a year ago in Romania, and led to footage posted on the military YouTube channel The Defense Now. The description below the video reads:
101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Soldiers arrive in Mihail Kogalniceanu, Romania, June 28, 2022. The 101st units are supporting V Corps' mission to reinforce NATO's eastern flank and engage in multinational exercises with partners across the European continent to reassure their Nation's Allies and deter further Russian aggression.
An image on the U.S. Department of Defense website confirms the arrival of American soldiers in Romania in June 2022.
A search (archived here) for the keywords "US" and "NATO" and "participate" and "Hamas Israel" and "conflict" and "war" and "Gaza" conducted by Lead Stories on December 1, 2023, using Google News' index of thousands of credible news sites did not reveal any factual reports to support the claim.
On November 1, 2023, NSC Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told reporters:
There's no plans or intention to put U.S. military troops on the ground in Gaza now or in the future.
On November 28, 2023, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated:
I think it's important to recognize that NATO as an Alliance does not play an active role in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Some Allies are active in different ways. But NATO as an Organisation is not directly involved.
