False claims about US general being killed in Gaza spread online
"BREAKING: Reports confirm the death of General John Pagri, Commander of the Special Tasks Battalion in the U.S. Army, in the Gaza Strip," says an April 6, 2025 X post with more than 30,000 likes.
The post also includes an image of two US soldiers holding firearms, with a mud brick wall in the distance.
The same claim has circulated elsewhere on X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and TikTok -- including in Spanish, French, Arabic and Turkish.
The Pravda Network, a group of websites the French government has accused of spreading pro-Kremlin disinformation, also amplified the claim.
The Israeli military restarted its ground and aerial offensive against Hamas in Gaza after a ceasefire between the two expired on March 18. Since the truce ended, at least 1,690 people have been killed, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
While the United States has lent considerable military and economic aid to Israel, there have been no announcements that American military personnel would take combat roles in the conflict that began with Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
US military personnel were stationed in Israel to help locate American hostages held in Gaza, but an AFP search of the US Army and National Guard databases of current generals showed no officer with the surname "Pagri."
A US Army soldier died in November 2024 after being injured during a problem-plagued operation to establish a temporary aid pier on the coast of Gaza, but Heather Hagan, a spokesperson for the United States Army, said there have been no American soldiers killed in Gaza recently.
She also said the soldiers in the photo circulating online are wearing camouflage uniforms that the Army retired in 2019. The men in the image appear to be wearing combat uniforms with the Universal Combat Pattern that the force discontinued in favor of the Operational Combat Pattern (archived here).
A reverse image search reveals the photograph was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, a website that collects free-use images, with a description that says that it was taken in 2007 in Iraq's Babil province (archived here).
Wikimedia Commons credits a blog post from the US National Guard as the source of the image. While the site has since been deleted, an archived version available via the Internet Archive says that the men in the image are two sergeants named Robbie Doman and Christopher W. Sullenberger.
Doman, standing in the middle of the photograph, received media coverage in 2017 when he appeared on the NBC television show "American Ninja Warrior" after being injured in an explosion in 2008 (archived here, and here).
Several US media outlets published images of Doman from his service in Iraq, which are similar to those used in the social media posts (archived here).
AFP has debunked other claims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.
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