Did Reuters publish a photo which shows a Moroccan police officer about to throw a rock down on a migrant who is crawling up a rocky embankment? No, that's not true: This image was made with OpenAI tools, it was not published by Reuters. The image closely resembles a scene which really did occur in or near the Spanish territory of Ceuta and was recorded from several angles. The OpenAI verification tool detected a SynthID watermark in the image that originated from OpenAI.
The fake image appeared in a post (archived here) published by the Instagram account @dilanbozyel on August 3, 2026. The caption, in both English and Turkish, begins in English:
30 July 2026.
History has left us thousands of photographs of human suffering. In recent years alone, we have witnessed an endless archive of war, famine, displacement, and unbearable loss. I thought I had become impossible to shock.
Then I saw this image.
A soldier stands above a man climbing the rocks at the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, holding a massive stone over his head.
For the first time in a very long while, my only thought was:
LET THE WORLD BURN.
(Image source: @dilanbozyel post on Instagram.)
The English portion caption continues:
Not because this photograph is extraordinary but because it is painfully familiar.
Refugees are not born at borders. They are created long before they reach them.
When a country makes dignity unaffordable, hope unreachable, and safety conditional, it doesn't simply produce poverty.
It produces exile.
And exile always begins in the soul before it reaches the map.
No one leaves home for the romance of another country.
They leave because home has already abandoned them.
Perhaps the truth is this: by now, we have all been abandoned.
Photo: Reuters @reuters
The Verify tool from OpenAI (archived here) detected a SynthID watermark that originated from OpenAI tools in the image (pictured below).
(Image source: OpenAI.)
A reverse image search with Google Lens for the image (archived here) returned many copies of the image posted on social media, but no image result pointed to Reuters as the source. There were several instances where this image appears as the thumbnail of a YouTube video. When it appears in a YouTube video it is always as a still image not a moving video scene.
A July 31, 2026, article from Reuters (archived here) describes the chaotic situation which played out over several days and resulted in at least 57 deaths:
Spain's Interior Ministry said around 50,000 people had crossed the border since Thursday morning, and estimated that 48,300 had returned by 6 p.m. (1600 GMT) on Friday.
There are at least two different videos which show a man attempting to climb to the top of the steep embankment. They have been widely reposted. The videos show a man ascending, sometimes using his hands, while someone in uniform throws rocks downward at him. Another video (archived here) published on YouTube by Agence France-Presse (AFP) News Agency on July 31, 2026, does not show this specific scene, but shows similarly attired forces with riot helmets, identified as "Moroccan police and security forces."
(Image source: screenshots from Algeria Gate and Shihabpresse videos on Facebook.)
Screenshots from two videos published on Facebook (pictured above) show the same moment filmed from slightly different locations. The man seems to rise up and gestures, at which point two of the uniformed forces beat him with batons. On the left, the screenshot is from 8 seconds in a video published by Algeria Gate in Aug. 3, 2026 (archived here). On the right, the screenshot is from 35 seconds in a video published by Shihabpresse on Aug. 1, 2026 (archived here). The shirtless bearded man visible in the bottom of the right screenshot appears 15 seconds later in the Algeria Gate video, at 23 seconds.
