Clips of housing rights protest falsely linked to Israel PM’s New York visit

As Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in New York for the United Nations summit in late September, social media users shared a video of people being arrested alongside a false claim they were “hotel staff” who refused to provide food service to the prime minister. However, the clip was in fact filmed in Washington during a protest against federal housing cuts.

“Netanyahu arrived in New York. Some staff at his hotel were arrested for refusing to provide meal services to him,” reads simplified Chinese sticker text over a video on TikTok shared on September 26, 2025.

The clip — viewed more than 140,000 times — begins with footage of Netanyahu disembarking from his plane before it cuts to people being led out of a hall as they shout “housing is a human right”.

Similar claims surfaced on Douyin, X, Facebook, and Bilibili as he arrived in New York on September 25, a day before he delivered a defiant speech at the UN General Assembly denying accusations of genocide in Gaza and denouncing Western countries for embracing Palestinian statehood (archived link).

This was followed by a visit to the White House four days later, where he backed US President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging Gaza peace plan that calls for a ceasefire, release of hostages by Hamas within 72 hours, disarmament of Hamas and gradual Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, followed by a post-war transitional authority headed by Trump himself (archived link).

Israel and Hamas agreed on October 9 to the first phase of a deal, which includes the militant group releasing hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and Israeli troops pulling back to an agreed line (archived link).

The Gaza war was triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that killed 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally from Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 67,160 people, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, figures the United Nations considers credible.

However, the circulating clip is unrelated to the Gaza war — it shows people protesting the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to housing aid in Washington.

As of October 9, 2025, there have not been credible reports of hotel staff being arrested during Netanyahu’s visit to the United States.

A reverse image search on Google found a higher quality version of the video shared on September 11 on TikTok, with a caption stating it showed police at the US Capitol arresting activists who were “demanding housing justice” (archived link).

The people can clearly be heard shouting “housing is a human right” and “housing for everyone”, and are wearing shirts printed with “no cuts to housing”.

Further keyword searches on Google found footage of the same group of people sitting on the ground in a cafeteria in a report by Kansas-based broadcaster KWCH 12 News, credited to “vocal.us” (archived link).

Subsequent searches led to an Instagram account of the same name that shared clips of the same incident on September 11 (archived link).

“Several homeless and housing insecure people staged a sit-in and pitched tents inside the Dirksen cafeteria to sound the alarm to everyone that we face an unimaginable crisis if these cuts go through,” reads the post, referring to a dining area in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington (archived link).

The caption said the protest was in partnership with another activist group, Popular Democracy in Action. AFP was able to match the people in the TikTok clip with the protesters in the videos posted by Popular Democracy in Action on the same day (archived link).

AFP has previously debunked other false claims related to Netanyahu.