The truth about babies being beheaded in Israel

Israel’s deadly war with Hamas has entered its seventh day. Amid speculations of a ground offensive, the Israeli military has asked 1.1 million civilians living in Gaza City to evacuate. However, Hamas on Friday (13 October) reportedly called on Palestinians in Gaza to stay put and avoid Israel’s order. As the war rages on, social media is filled with rampant disinformation. Since the latest escalation started on the weekend as Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on the West Asian nation, unverified posts, videos and images on the conflict keep surfacing on platforms like Facebook, X and TikTok. These are further amplified by thousands and sometimes even millions of accounts. One explosive claim that made headlines globally was that Hamas beheaded babies when it infiltrated the southern Israeli territory bordering Gaza on 7 October. Here’s all we know about this allegation so far. How the unverified claim spread The allegation flared up after Nicole Zedek, a reporter with Tel Aviv-based news channel i24, said in a live broadcast that Israeli soldiers told her about witnessing decapitated babies. Later, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) described the scene at the kibbutz of Kfar Aza as a “massacre”, saying women, children and elderly were “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action”, as per a CNN report. This claim was reiterated by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson, Tal Heinrich, who said on Wednesday (11 October) that babies were found with their “heads decapitated” in Kfar Aza, the report added. The accusation further blew up after United States president Joe Biden claimed to had seen pictures of beheaded children in a meeting with Jewish community leaders on Wednesday. “I have been doing this a long time, I never really thought that I would see… have confirmed pictures of terrorist beheading children,” he said. However, the White House later walked back on Biden’s claim, saying the remarks were based on news reports and comments by the Israeli government. “A White House spokesperson later clarified that US officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently,” reported The Washington Post. [caption id=“attachment_13244092” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] The personal belongings of festival-goers at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas gunmen from Gaza, in southern Israel on 12 October. Reuters[/caption] According to The Times of Israel, in a conversation with Biden on Wednesday, Netanyahu told the US president: “They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them and executed them. They beheaded soldiers, they mowed down these youngsters who came to a nature festival". Later that day, an IDF spokesman, Jonathan Conricus, alleged that they got “disturbing reports that came from the ground that there were babies that had been beheaded.” “I think we can now say with relative confidence that unfortunately this is what happened in Be’eri (a small kibbutz in southern Israel),” he was quoted as saying by The Telegraph. What’s happening now? On Thursday (12 October), the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office released what it said were “horrifying photos of babies murdered and burned by the Hamas monsters". One image appears to be the body of a blood-stained baby, lying inside a small body bag. Other distressing pictures showed charred remains of infants. Netanyahu’s office said, “Hamas is inhuman. Hamas is ISIS”, comparing the Palestinian militant group to the Islamic State, which was notorious for its brutal execution videos. Israel’s PMO said these were some of the photographs shown to US secretary of state Antony Blinken, who was in Tel Aviv yesterday. A spokesman for the PMO told The Times of Israel they shared the images on X “so that the world will see just a fraction of the horrors that Hamas carried out.” Firstpost has decided not to share the tweet due to the graphic photographs. Also, we cannot independently confirm the veracity of the images. Commenting on the pictures which he said displayed “simply depravity in the worst imaginable way”, Blinken said, “It’s hard to find the right words, it’s beyond what anyone would ever want to imagine, much less actually see and God forbid experience. “A baby, and infants riddled with bullets … Soldiers beheaded, young people burned alive in their cars.” “It’s simply depravity in the worst imaginable way. Images are worth a thousand words. These images may be worth a million,” Reuters quoted the US secretary of state as saying. These pictures were also part of a video played by Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant for his counterparts at NATO’s Brussels headquarters, reported Reuters. According to a CNN report published on Thursday night, an Israeli official said the Netanyahu government has “not confirmed” the claim that Hamas militants cut off the heads of babies during their rampage on 7 October. “There have been cases of Hamas militants carrying out beheadings and other ISIS-style atrocities. However, we cannot confirm if the victims were men or women, soldiers or civilians, adults or children,” the official told the American broadcaster.

Hamas denies allegations On Wednesday, Hamas denied claims that its attackers beheaded children and assaulted women, calling them “lies”. As per CNN, Izzat al-Risheq, a senior official and spokesperson for the militant group, said that the international media had “spread lies about our Palestinian people and the resistance claiming that members of the Palestinian resistance beheaded children and attacked women with no evidence to support such claims and lies.” However, multiple reports have confirmed that Hamas gunmen targeted women. Medics, international human rights organisations and journalists have reported that militants killed women, children and the elderly during the stealth attack. Thousands have died and many people have been injured in both Israel and Gaza since the conflict erupted on the weekend. With inputs from agencies