Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images
Gigi Hadid on Tuesday walked back her false claim that Israel is the “only country in the world” that keeps children as prisoners of war, saying she did not “fact check” before posting.
The 28-year-old model, who is of Palestinian descent, was hit with a barrage of criticism for the now-deleted Instagram post, in which she also accused Israel in all-caps of the “abduction, rape, humiliation, torture, [and] murder” of Palestinians for “years and years and years” prior to the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7.
The post also invoked Ahmad Manasra, the Palestinian youth jailed by Israel after being convicted of stabbing two Israelis in 2015. Manasra, then 13 years old, was tried on two counts of attempted murder after the attacks, which wounded a 20-year-old security guard and another 13-year-old boy. The teenager was ordered to serve 12 years in prison, a sentence that was later reduced to 9-and-a-half-years.