Around the start of January 2026, a video (archived) circulated online that claimed to show martial artist and actor Jackie Chan saying he cried over a video of a Palestinian child saying children in Gaza don't grow up.
According to reports in Turkish news outlets CNN Türk and TRT World and the U.K.-based, Middle East-focused news outlet Middle East Eye (archived), Chan made the remarks during the Beijing premiere of his new Chinese-language movie. TRT World posted a video on Jan. 1 of Chan's reported remarks.
According to TRT World, Chan said:
I watched a video recently. I started crying as soon as that little kid started speaking. They asked him, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" He said, "Children don't grow up here." I started crying. Gaza. You see it, Gaza's children are bombed every day. He had no expression when he said, "Children don't grow up here." I couldn't hold it in, I cried. You see, growing old is a blessing. That is why I congratulate everyone who's had the chance to grow old. You will grow old too, so will I.
The video of Chan circulated on X (archived), Facebook (archived), Threads (archived), Instagram (archived), Bluesky (archived) and Reddit (archived). Snopes readers searched our site to find out whether the video was real and whether Chan actually said the reported words.
A report by Chinese state media and Getty Images, a trusted picture agency, showed Chan attended a film premiere for "Unexpected Family," his latest movie, on Dec. 28, 2025, wearing an identical outfit to that seen in the video that circulated online.
Chinese state media reported Chan spoke to an audience at the event but did not include his reported quote about crying over the words of a Palestinian child. Other Chinese-language reports also did not include this quote (archived, archived, archived, archived).
Snopes reached out to Chan's management to ask whether the clip authentically showed the actor speaking. We also reached out to TRT World, CNN Türk and Middle East Eye to ask how they sourced and verified the video. We await replies to our queries.
Meanwhile, on the basis of the available evidence, we leave this claim unrated.
Inspecting the video
It was unclear at the time of this writing who recorded the video of Chan speaking, which appeared to be from the Dec. 28 event in Beijing.
We did not find decisive evidence that the video of Chan was fake, meaning generated by artificial intelligence. Analysis by online AI detectors Hive Moderation and SightEngine found screenshots from the video unlikely to be AI-generated.
(Hive Moderation/Sight Engine/Snopes Illustration)
Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector analyzed soundbites from the beginning, middle and end of the video and found two of three to be authentic. Chan's mouth movements generally appeared to match his speaking pattern, meaning it did not appear that someone had put AI-generated audio over authentic pictures. (Research shows AI-detection software is imperfect. Readers should consider the tools' results with skepticism.)
A transcript of the video by ElevenLabs, an artificial intelligence transcription app, generally matched the subtitles for the clip provided by TRT, meaning it did not appear someone had put unrelated subtitles on an authentic video.
According to ElevenLabs and DeepL translation, Chan said:
Recently I watched a video, and the moment that child spoke, I started crying. He asked, "What do you adults do? Here, our children never grow up." Wow, my tears just started streaming down. Gaza, the children of Gaza, bombed every day. Look, he said this, nothing else—our children here never grow up. Waaah, I just broke down. So you see, old age is a kind of happiness. So here, congratulations to all the elders who can grow old.
Snopes consulted a Mandarin speaker, who also said the subtitles generally matched Chan's words.