Watch: Greta Laughs Off The Climate Kids She Left Behind For Gaza

Greta Thunberg burst out laughing on camera when told that the climate movement she founded was still holding demonstrations, in a 27-second scene from a new German documentary that has ricocheted across X this week. She launched the Fridays for Future school strikes as a 15-year-old in 2018.

The clip comes from Auf Panzern in die Klimakrise (“On Tanks Into The Climate Crisis”), a 100-minute independent film by German YouTuber and filmmaker Hubertus Koch. Meeting Thunberg in Berlin, Koch tells her it is “kind of symbolic” that their interview fell on the day of a Fridays for Future demonstration in the city.

“Is it?” Thunberg asks, before dissolving into loud laughter. “Really?” When Koch says yes, she follows up: “They still do that?”

The companions laughing along at the table were Hebh Jamal and Judith Scheytt, who sailed with Thunberg on the Gaza flotilla, according to Apollo News, which reported that the scene was shot at a Palestinian café in Berlin. Visegrad 24′s post of the clip alone drew more than 380,000 views within a day.

Koch’s film is built on the argument that the climate movement didn’t fizzle out on its own but was crushed by police, prosecutors and the press, and is now coming back as an anti-war movement, per a write-up of the documentary. In the film, Thunberg says she didn’t take up protest to save trees or frogs but for justice and equality, and her focus is now fighting capitalism, Apollo News reported.

In Germany, where Fridays for Future still marches, the movement’s best-known face shrugged it off. Luisa Neubauer said she stays focused on the cause and won’t be distracted, and told Welt TV that activists don’t have to agree on everything, including forms of protest and narratives, Tagesspiegel reported. The split is not new: German Fridays for Future distanced itself from Thunberg in 2023 over her posts on Gaza after the Hamas attack on Israel, t-online reported at the time.

Since then, Thunberg’s activism has run mostly through the Palestinian cause. She was detained by Israeli forces aboard a Gaza-bound aid boat in June 2025, after which she said she had been “kidnapped”, and again when Israel intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla in October 2025; Israel dismissed reports that she was abused in custody as “brazen lies.” In December, as we reported, she was arrested in the City of London under the Terrorism Act for holding a placard supporting jailed Palestine Action activists, a group Britain has banned as a terrorist organization.

The clip landed the same week Thunberg returned to the UN climate talks for the first time since Glasgow in 2021, where she waved off world leaders’ promises as “blah, blah, blah.” Arriving at COP31 in the Turkish resort city of Antalya on Tuesday, she called the summit a hypocrisy: “It’s a hypocrisy every year that the host countries are given an opportunity to whitewash themselves and we know that these negotiations are filled with lobbyists, paid by the very destructive industries which are benefiting from our extremely violent status quo,” she said.

She also called for an oil embargo against Israel and “justice for Kurdistan” (translated) at the summit, according to Tagesspiegel. The talks, co-hosted by Turkey and Australia, run until Nov. 20.

Climate change, Thunberg told reporters in Antalya, is “threatening everything” – “everything and everyone we love is at stake.”