No, viral footage doesn’t show explosives disguised as food cans in Gaza

Social media users are claiming the Israeli military has booby-trapped food cans in Gaza, where, by the United Nations’ count, more than 570,000 Gazans face "catastrophic hunger" amid the Israel-Hamas war.

A Jan. 24 Instagram post shared a photo of about a dozen metal cylinders and claimed the Israeli military left "these detonators that resemble food cans" at schools in Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza.

"Thinking they were food, displaced families opened the cans. As soon as they did, they exploded and killed them instantly," the post said. The Instagram post’s caption claimed that Israeli forces were "taking advantage of the desperate situation in Gaza." 

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

(Screengrab from Instagram)

Multiple X posts also shared footage of the cans and similarly claimed they were concealed munitions. But these social media posts are misleading.

Although there has been significant news coverage of Israel’s recent attacks on Khan Younis, we found no reports about Israel using explosives disguised as food cans in Gaza. 

Experts on military strategy and the Middle East reviewed the footage and told PolitiFact the munition is likely the American-made M603 fuze, which is designed to detonate landmines.

Some pro-Palestinian news outlets shared the video that’s been circulating social media, but they provided no additional information to substantiate the claim.

The Middle East Monitor, which shared the viral video, used English subtitles to accompany the Arabic-speaking man in the video. The man claims the metal devices are "canned meat … found to contain a hidden danger" that "detonate instantly" if opened. (We were not able to independently verify the translation.)

A longer version of the video shows at least one of the cans is labeled "fuze mine." There are no visible labels or pictures on the cans that suggest they contain food.

At one point in the video, the man holds up a fuze that’s been removed from its container. 

Diagrams of the fuze and its container show the "keyway," or opening mechanism, is on the can’s bottom. In the video, most of the cans have been turned upside-down to make it look as if the keyway is on top.

The fuze container is not designed to explode upon opening. Instructions under the diagrams say to open the container and remove the fuze to attach it to a landmine.

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This fuze is activated when a large amount of force is applied, driving the firing pin into the detonator and causing the landmine to explode, experts said. The metal cylinder acts as a container for the fuze.

The M603 fuze alone requires at least 140 pounds to activate, according to Collective Awareness to Unexploded Ordnance, an explosive hazards database. When attached to a landmine, it could take as much as 750 pounds of force to trigger an explosion.

Because so much weight and pressure are required to ignite the fuze and detonate an explosive, it’s "highly unlikely anyone was harmed or killed by opening up the container that holds this fuze," retired U.S. Army Lt. General Mark Schwartz told PolitiFact.

"All the fuzes also have a safety clip on them. I doubt that anyone was deliberately targeted with these fuzes," said Schwartz, who is also a senior fellow at Rand Corp., a nonpartisan research organization.

It’s possible the fuzes are being used for purposes beyond their original design, said Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

One such use could be booby-trapping buildings, which is common in urban warfare, he added.

But Nadimi said he is "a little skeptical" that opening the cans causes deadly explosions given how these fuzes are typically activated.

We rate the claim that a photo shows explosives disguised as food cans False.