Misleading clip purports to show Miss Israel glaring at Miss Palestine, sparking uproar

Israel’s contestant in the ongoing Miss Universe pageant in Thailand received graphic death and rape threats after a misleading video shared on social media appeared to show her giving a dirty look to Miss Palestine, despite the two contestants actually standing in different rows at the time.

A clip that went viral showed Israel’s contestant Melanie Shiraz looking to her right, ostensibly at Palestinian Nadeen Ayoub. Footage taken from a more straightforward angle of the same moments, however, clarified that Shiraz was behind Ayoub, and that Miss Israel’s glance was not in the latter’s direction.

“My social media got swarmed with hate comments and just these clips from this video that looked like I was standing right next to her,” Shiraz, 27, told Fox News on Monday. “I first thought it was AI or something, then I realized that it just came from a different camera that had a very distorted perspective.”

Shiraz said that in response to the misleading footage, she received a swarm of threats, “to the point of, ‘I want to rape and kill you’ or, ‘I hope that you end up like one of the hostages that got raped and shot in the head.’”

In that interview, Shiraz noted: “During the competition I had realized that there was a specific cameraman who was centered right on” Ayoub, and that “they seemed to have some kind of communication between them, which was striking to me.”

The viral footage was uploaded to TikTok by an account mostly populated with shots of Miss Indonesia. It was not immediately clear by whom it was shot, or from where it was taken. In other footage from the event’s official broadcast that was later posted online, the actual placement of the two women was easier to discern.

Posting the two angles side by side on Instagram, Shiraz wrote: “Sensationalizing intentionally misleading, edited, or incomplete content at the expense of another woman is disappointing — from the public, the media, and even from Israeli outlets that should uphold higher standards. Especially when it takes moments to fact-check. And especially when there are real stories, real crises and real human beings whose voices deserve attention far more than a manufactured narrative about a glance.”

Shiraz and Ayoub, who is the first-ever Miss Palestine at the contest, have clashed in the past.

In an Instagram video posted in October, Shiraz pointed to a recent post by Ayoub, which appears to have since been deleted, in which the Palestinian contestant included photos of murdered Israeli child hostages Ariel and Kfir Bibas above a caption mourning the deaths of Palestinian children.

“These children are innocent,” Ayoub wrote in the now-unavailable post. “Their only ‘crime’ was being born in Palestine. We must speak for them, for the injustice they have endured.”

Shiraz criticized that post, as well as others where Ayoub appeared to refer to parts of Israel as Palestine, or inflated the death toll in the Gaza war.

“Let me be absolutely clear: These children were Israeli,” Shiraz said regarding the Bibas boys. “They were born in Israel, they lived in Israel, and they were murdered because they were Israeli. The land they came from was not called Palestine. To present them otherwise is a deliberate distortion meant to erase their true identity and to suggest falsely that Israel is simply Palestine.”

Melanie Shiraz, Miss Universe Israel, absolutely shreds "Miss Palestine" for presenting the Bibas children as 'Palestinian'.

Please watch all of it.

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Extremely important and well spoken. pic.twitter.com/du8c3ptgp9

— ???????????????? ???????????????? ♛ ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) October 6, 2025

Ayoub, for her part, has accused Israel repeatedly of “genocide,” including in a Facebook post published on October 30, 2023, just weeks after the Hamas-led onslaught against Israel that killed 1,200 people and sparked the war.

Both women have lived in the United States in addition to Israel or the West Bank. Shiraz was born in Israel and resided in Florida and California, studying at the University of California, Berkeley. She now lives in Tel Aviv.

Ayoub, born to Palestinian parents in Michigan, lived as a child in Ramallah, and then moved to Canada, according to a video she posted. She now lives in Dubai.

Bonhomie between the two contestants seems unlikely, but the 2017 pageant did see an unlikely friendship, as Miss Iraq, Sarah Idan, posed with Miss Israel, Adar Gandelsman. Idan defended that photo, and her relatives were forced to flee Iraq as a result.

This article has been updated with new information, and misleading footage that was previously embedded in it has been removed.