Hoax: "Israel Tricks Hungry Children With Bombs in Food Cans"

On October 19, 2025, a week after the Gaza ceasefire took effect, the Instagram account of Jarrod Wright, a self-described "Biblical Masculinity Coach" who hosts The Wright Wing podcast, posted a 56-second clip of two men talking. It drew 14,445 likes and 1,337 comments.

• On-screen text: "Israel tricks hungry children with bombs in food cans and many Christians are supporting it"
• Caption: "Israel blows up innocent children and many Christians are supporting it. We need to understand what's TRULY happening overseas and realize that these are EVIL people"
• What's said in the clip: Israel "was putting bombs in little cans of food so that when they opened it, it would detonate… putting it out by the orphanages in Palestine so that little kids would open the food hungry and get blown up."

The speaker says "apparently" — he does not claim to have checked it. The on-screen text drops the hedge and states it as fact.

The "food cans" are not food cans, and they do not explode when opened. The claim first went viral in January 2024, with video of a man holding up olive-green cans said to have been left by Israeli soldiers in Khan Younis. Fact-checkers and explosives experts identified them as storage containers for land-mine fuzes (the cans are marked "FUZE MINE"):

• AAP FactCheck (February 5, 2024) rated the claim false: "The cans are containers for detonators and do not explode on opening." Mark Hiznay of Human Rights Watch said detonating a fuze would require "an intentional act on the part of someone"; an explosives-disposal consultant called the fuze on its own "useless."
• PolitiFact (February 1, 2024) and Logically Facts reached the same conclusion.
• Military analyst Ryan McBeth identified them as containers for M603 fuzes used in the M15 anti-tank mine, and noted the video may not have been filmed in Gaza.

The "booby-trapped can" injury report traces to Hamas's media office, and the UN later added a caveat. In its Flash Update #160 (May 1, 2024), the UN humanitarian office OCHA relayed a report from Gaza's Government Media Office (run by Hamas) that a 14-year-old boy was injured "after opening a booby-trapped can of food," and that "many people have been recently injured due to the explosion of booby-trapped canned goods." OCHA later added a marked correction to the same update: "Booby traps are not a threat UN specialized agencies have documented in Gaza."

We found no evidence of the rest of the story. We found no report, from any source, of explosive food cans being left near orphanages, and no evidence that Israel disguised explosives as food to target children.

Children in Gaza have been killed and maimed by unexploded munitions left from the war, and that danger grew as families returned to destroyed neighborhoods after the ceasefire (for example, AP's report of twins wounded by a bomb in the rubble they thought was a toy, October 2025). The UN Mine Action Service has warned for years that unexploded ordnance poses a serious risk of injury and death.

That is a real tragedy, and it is a different claim. Leftover munitions are a hazard of every modern war. The reel's claim is that Israel deliberately disguised bombs as food to lure and kill hungry children, and that claim is not supported by any evidence we found.

The clip also includes opinions, which we note but do not rate: the speaker's belief that the Jewish people are no longer "God's chosen people," his view of Christians who support Israel, and his assertion that Israel kills children "because they're Muslim." The last of these is presented as fact but rests on the food-can claim above, which is false.

This is a variant of a broader hoax category. See Hoax: "Israel Hid Explosives in Toys and Food to Harm Palestinian Children", which also covers how to check footage claims like this one.