False: US Marine Corps Commandant Eric Smith is still alive and ‘did not die in Gaza’
A video posted on Facebook on July 14 claimed that Gen. Eric Smith, the U.S. Marine Corps commandant, was shot in the head by Palestinian snipers in the Gaza Strip and died on that day.
The male narrator says in Mandarin that the incident that caused Smith to “pass away in hospital” was reported by “several international media.”
He continues to say: “The Americans implicitly acknowledge that their Marine Corps commandant died in Gaza, but they didn’t admit he was shot by a sniper. The U.S. claimed he died from a heart attack during a combat inspection in Gaza.”
The one-minute video also shows assorted clips, including medical workers wheeling patients on stretchers to ambulance vehicles, snipers, and a troop member being shot in the back. This Facebook post has gotten nearly 140 likes.
Similar claims about Smith’s death after being shot in Gaza also circulated on Chinese social media platforms in mid-July, for example on Toutiao (here and here) and Weibo.
However, the claim is false. Official photos published after the posts were uploaded show Smith is still alive.
A search on the U.S. Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) led to photos of Smith taken in late July.
For example, his visit to Camp Pendleton, on July 26, at a live-fire training exercise on July 23, to Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and Marine Corps Air Station Miramar on July 22.
All of these events took place in California.
Video clips
The Facebook video also includes unrelated clips of military actions, with most of the misleading clips flipped horizontally.
A combination of reverse image and keyword searches found that the clip of a medical evacuation was previously published on Dec. 26, 2023, by Palestinian news outlets Al Asima News Network and Quds News Network.
According to the reports, a group of Israeli soldiers were transferred to a hospital in Jerusalem after being wounded in Gaza.
The misleading video also shows scenes of a troop member targeted by a sniper. Those clips previously appeared in reports from Al Jazeera in mid-March 2024 about how the snipers of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, tracked down and killed Israeli officer Yitzhar Hoffman.
Hamas believed Hoffman, a commander in the Israeli air force’s elite Shaldag unit, was responsible for the siege of Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza in November 2023. The 36-year-old was killed in Gaza in January 2024, reported the Times of Israel and other local media i24News and Ynet News.
Al Jazeera said they obtained the “exclusive footage” from the Qassam Brigades, which published part of the clips some days earlier, on March 11. Another part of the clips appeared on Reddit on Feb. 17.
The false claim that Smith died in Gaza first circulated in November 2023, shortly after he had a heart attack on Oct. 29.
Fact-checking organizations such as Taiwan FactCheck Center, Mygopen and Radio Free Asia have debunked the claim.
Smith survived the heart attack, had a heart surgery in January 2024, and resumed full duty on March 5, according to the U.S. Marine Corps and the Associated Press.
As of Aug. 6, there are no credible reports from reputable news outlets nor the U.S. military that Smith had died, been shot in Gaza or suffered from another heart attack.
