'All Eyes on Rafah' image gets over 29 million shares in 24 hours. What it means

The 'All Eyes on Rafah' image appears to be one of the first pieces of viral activist iconography created by artificial intelligence.

An image depicting tents in a camp arranged to spell out “All Eyes on Rafah,” an area in the south of Gaza filled with refugee tent camps --where at least 45 civilians died after an Israeli strike on Sunday -- has gone viral on social media. It has been shared more than 29 million times on Instagram in less than 24 hours, reports stated.

The phrase holds significance as Israel’s war on Gaza continues despite the major global outcry. "'All eyes on Rafah' is a phrase that refers to the ongoing genocide in Rafah, Gaza, with over 1.4 million Palestinians seeking shelter," Iran's Embassy in India had earlier shared.

The picture also appears to be one of the first pieces of viral activist iconography created by artificial intelligence (AI) as it does not appear photorealistic, experts said.

Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of Middle East studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who studies misinformation, told NBC News the image “definitely looks” AI-generated. He said it has unusual shadows, and the tent camp pictured is unnaturally sprawling and symmetrical -- a sign of pattern repetition common in AI-generated images.

In India, several celebrities including actors Richa Chadha, Priyanka Chopra, Alia Bhatt, Madhuri Dixit, Sonam Kapoor, Swara Bhaskar, Ileana D’Cruz, Dia Mirza, Varun Dhawan, Samantha Prabhu and filmmaker Atlee, former tennis star Sania Mirza, and comedian Vir Das used the 'All Eyes on Rafah' image to announce their stand in support of Gaza.

Thread of celebrities with a spine who dared to show solidarity for Rafah.

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1. Swara Bhasker pic.twitter.com/vRAR70YMgn

— Nehr_who? (@Nher_who) May 28, 2024

Heermandi actor Richa Chada said, "The state of Israel is committing settler colonial genocide on the starving, dehydrated, entrapped population of Gaza. This is the cold-blooded murder of babies, women, pregnant women, innocent civilians, journalists, medical aid workers and doctors. This is genocide, there is no other word for it, and it must be condemned in unequivocal terms. If the world just watches, the world is complicit. Ceasefire now! Decolonize now!"

Actor Malaika Arora highlighted that "there is no such thing as killing children legally."

Alia Bhatt took to  Instagram and shared a post with the hashtag "All Eyes on Rafah". It read: “All children deserve love. All children deserve safety. All children deserve peace. All children deserve life. And all mothers deserve to be able to give their children those things.”

According to reports, two days after an Israeli airstrike on another camp stirred global condemnation, Gaza emergency services said four tank shells on Tuesday hit a cluster of tents in Al-Mawasi, a coastal strip Israel designated as an expanded humanitarian zone where it advised civilians in Rafah to go for safety. At least 12 of the dead on Tuesday were women, according to medical officials in the Hamas militant-run Palestinian enclave.

Global leaders have voiced horror at the fire in a designated "humanitarian zone" where families uprooted by fighting elsewhere in Gaza had sought shelter, and urged the implementation of a World Court order for a halt to Israel's assault.