Image of 'Gazan mother with son's bones' is made with AI

Gazans cried over the bodies of their loved ones as Israeli strikes resumed in March following a fragile ceasefire. But an image circulating worldwide on social media as a genuine depiction of a Palestinian mother cradling her son’s remains is AI-generated.

“A mother holds the bones of her son in Gaza. After more than a year and a half of searching for him under the rubble of their bombed-out house,” reads a Malay-language Facebook post shared on March 24.

It features a close-up image of a woman cradling a skeleton in front of a pile of rubble.

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on March 26, 2025

Israel’s resumption of intense bombardment and ground operations across Gaza shattered weeks of relative calm brought by a truce in January, and militants returned to launching rocket attacks days later (archived here and here).

According to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, 830 people have been killed in the territory since Israel restarted its strikes on March 18. No deaths have been reported on the Israeli side.

The war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

Of the 251 hostages seized during the attack, 58 are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 50,183 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry.

The image was also passed off as genuine elsewhere on Facebook as well as on Telegram and ricocheted among social media users in the Palestinian territoriesthe United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates.

AI-generated

A keyword search found a wider-angle version of the image first shared March 21 on Instagram alongside the disclaimer: “This visual representation is an AI-generated image created for illustrative purposes” (archived link).

Watermarks that say “in.visualart” on the upper left side and “designed by in.visualart” on the lower left part have been cropped out in the circulating posts.

The primary Instagram account sharing the image — called “in.visualart” — describes itself as a “designer” and labels its content as “AI tools” and “AI-generated image”.

Shu Huhead of Purdue University’s Machine Learning and Media Forensics Lab in the United States, told AFP the image was AI-generated (archived link).

Hu pointed out the woman’s blurry teeth in the image and said that there was “no obvious segmentation”, one of the hallmarks of AI-generated imagery.

While there is no foolproof method to spot AI-generated mediaidentifying watermarks and visual inconsistencies can help, as errors still occur despite the meteoric progress in generative AI.

AFP has debunked a wave of misinformation around the Israel-Hamas war here.