The Hamas baby beheading hoax refers to allegations, since refuted, that Hamas killed and beheaded dozens of babies and toddlers during the incursion it launched into southern Israel on October 7, 2023, which constituted the first phase of the Gaza war. The allegations were first made by soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and members of Israeli civilian rescue groups, in interviews with local and international journalists. The hoax was initially endorsed by US PresidentJoe Biden and the office of Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu, and was then spread credulously by western media outlets, gaining widespread coverage and - according to some commentators - helping to shape the consensus in favor of war on the Gaza Strip. Similar reports accused Hamas of hanging or slitting the throats of babies and burning others alive, including by stuffing at least one young child into a hot oven.
Since then, only one victim of the October 7 violence in Israel has actually been identified as an infant – a 9-month-old girl who was shot by Hamas. At times the Israeli government has also discreetly admitted since then that the rumors about the beheaded children are unfounded. The hoax is presented by critics of the war on Gaza as an example of atrocity propaganda.
The hoax
The rumor places the alleged atrocity at the kibbutz of Kfar Aza, which was the target of a Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. The kibbutz was only completely retaken by Israeli forces on October 10, the same day that the macabre stories began to circulate. According to them, Hamas militants had beheaded dozens of babies and toddlers and hanged many other children in Kfar Aza. According to the official death toll, however, the youngest victim of the massacre that occurred there was fourteen-years-old.[1]
Le Monde traced the origins of the hoax, which it calls a "rumour", to a press tour of the kibbutz held just hours after the battle ended. Sixty residents had been killed, and bodies from both sides of the conflict were still strewn across the ground. At the scene, according to Le Monde, "the general staff made no mention of dead babies," and the journalists themselves noted that all the bodies belonging to Israelis were in adult-sized body bags.[1]
However, reserve soldiers and ZAKA members, to whom journalists had free access,[2][1] offered accounts that "were murkier and disturbing."[1] Testimonies from other sites under attack may have been confusedly mixed with those from Kfar Aza, giving rise to the hoax concerning the violence in Kfar Aza. Le Monde believes that the lack of professionalism of ZAKA members – who are civilian volunteers from the ultra-Orthodox sector and may lack the expertise to distinguish adult remains from those of children – may have given rise to the rumor, noting that a United Nations report on sexual violence on October 7 similarly highlights the existence of "inaccurate and unreliable forensic interpretations by some non-professionals" on the subject.[1]
But the paper also noted when ZAKA spokespeople "went into... overdrive", such as the statement by ZAKA founder Yossi Landau that he had personally seen the bodies of children and babies who had been decapitated. Haaretz accused ZAKA, which had been struggling with financial crisis, of exploiting its work during October 7 for fundraising.[1][3]
Reserve soldiers at the kibbutz also offered unsubstantiated testimony involving children's bodies "hanging from a clothesline."[1]Le Monde estimates that the reliability of these soldiers was low, but reporters were able to talk with them without the supervision of the IDF spokesperson's team.[1][2] Israeli TV channel i24NEWS also claimed on October 10 that the information about the decapitated babies had come from Israeli soldiers.[4]
Associate professor of Middle East studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University Marc Owen Jones reckoned that, in its most complete form, the myth of the 40 decapitated babies crystallized from a social media post by Nicole Zedeck of i24NEWS and a TV report by this same journalist. It was on a viral TV report that Zedeck broke the story about the decapitated babies, reporting that it was from soldiers that she had received this news. And in another post on X (Twitter), she further claimed that, according to soldiers, "40 babies/children were killed." From then on, Jones says, the two information bits were likely connected and became one.[4]
A related story, which also gained traction, was published on social media by the Israeli Foreign Ministry based on a report by a military officer who claimed he had found the bodies of eight babies who had been burned to death in a home on the Be'eri kibbutz.[5] Another officer falsely claimed he had found the bodies of eight babies who had been executed in a nursery on the same kibbutz and that among the victims of the massacre was an Auschwitz survivor.[6]
Institutional role
On the same day, the reports were repeated as fact by senior Israeli and American officials. Israeli army spokespeople reiterated them to English- and French-language media outlets,[1] although IDF sources said the story remained unconfirmed after being repeatedly contacted by the British channel Sky News.[7] The IDF told Business Insider that the soldiers' testimonies would not be investigated and should be taken as sufficient evidence in themselves.[4][8]
On next day, President Biden categorically stated in a press conference that he had seen "confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,"[4] and Prime Minister Netanyahu's spokesman repeated the same language.[9][10] US congressmen from both the Democratic and Republican parties also spread the uncorroborated reports on social media.[2] The Prime Minister's Office's X account mentioned the killing of infants, posting graphic images as confirmation and claiming to have shown the material to US Secretary of StateAntony Blinken.[5] In turn, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs shared photos of burned babies' bodies, though it later deleted them.[1]
In the first weeks of October 2023, the unfounded allegation was treated as established truth by several western media outlets. The British tabloid Daily Mail described Hamas's actions as a "holocaust plain and simple,"[9] while, along with several other British newspapers, The Times and Metro both accused Hamas of having beheaded or murdered several babies on their front pages.[9]
In a dramatic live broadcast on CNN, reporter Sara Sidner accused Hamas of beheading dozens of babies and toddlers in Kfar Aza, citing the Israeli Prime Minister's spokesman as her source. Sidner described Hamas's actions as "beyond devastating," adding that they would make it "impossible for Israel to make peace with Hamas."[11] When Hamas denied the allegations, her colleague Hadas Gold of the Jerusalem bureau called the group's position unbelievable, falsely adding that such atrocities had been caught on film and equating Hamas's actions with the Holocaust.[11]Fox News went as far as hounding U.S. Rep.Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, to say something about "terrorists chopping off babies' heads."[2]
Some backtracking and clarifications took place in the following days. On the 12th, the White House "clarified" that President Biden had not actually seen the images with his own eyes, but had merely passed on to the public what he had been told.[12] (A memo signed by hundreds of US diplomats, leaked in November 2023, accused the president of "spreading misinformation" about the conflict.)[13] The Israeli PM's office also said it was not in a position to confirm the veracity of the story, which had been spread by its spokesperson the day before.[1] On October 12, CNN’s Sidner apologized for having taken the statement by the Israeli PM's spokesperson at face value.[14] And Israeli journalist Ishay Coen deleted a post publishing the testimony of a military officer who had claimed to have discovered the bodies of hanged babies. "Why would an army officer invent such a horrifying story? I was wrong," Coen said.[5] On November 30, i24news quietly inserted a correction to an article about the beheadings, despite previously complaining that "anti-Israeli voices" were trying to discredit its reporter.[1]
Critics of the war on Gaza, however, say the retractions have not had the same reach as the original stories. CNN continued to push the false beheading story for 18 hours even after the White House clarification, only taking the extra step of attaching a Hamas denial.[11] Nor did the lack of evidence stop the allegation from continuing to circulate and new details from being added to it. In late October 2023, for example, an IDF officer alleged he found the remains of a decapitated baby.[15] Days before, that same officer, colonel Golan Vach, head of the military search and rescue service, told a group of French MPs visiting Kfar Aza that he had personally transported the bodies of newborn babies found on the kibbutz – "although", says Le Monde, "there were none on the kibbutz."[1]
Investigations
In December 2023, Haaretz published the results of a comprehensive investigation into the violence of October 7. The conclusion was that while Hamas had committed real "atrocities" that day, some of the barbaric acts attributed to the group were false and were fueling denialism about October 7. Although Hamas had desecrated or dismembered the bodies of some Israelis, these belonged for the most part to fallen soldiers, the article said.[5]
Netanyahu's claim to Biden that Hamas "took dozens of children, tied them up, burned them and executed them" also proved inaccurate, since, "There is no evidence that children from several families were murdered together".[5]
Haaretz and other Israeli media outlets have established that one Israeli infant was indeed killed that day – Mila Cohen, who was shot in her mother's arms in the Be'eri kibbutz (and therefore not in Kfar Aza).[5][16] As such, the story of the baby being thrown into the hot oven — told by the United Hatzalah president Eli Beer at a November 2023 donor conference in the US — must also be untrue, concluded the paper.[5]Le Monde, for its part, counts two infants as victims of the violence that day: Cohen and a baby delivered post-mortem who perished two days after its mother's death.[1]
Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit (I-Unit) also produced a forensic analysis of 7 October, released in March 2024. It confirmed that Hamas committed abuses in its attack, but also found that "many" stories about its actions were false and that some fatalities on the Israeli side had in fact been the result of IDF action. Among the false stories were "the mass killing and beheading of babies as well as allegations of widespread and systematic rape".[17] The document refutes claims by the Israeli military that the bodies of eight babies were found burned in a house in kibbutz Be'eri. Not only were there no babies in that house, but "the 12 people inside were almost certainly killed by Israeli forces when they stormed the building", I-Unit concludes.[17]
Aftermath
Despite the weakness of the claims, they continued to be repeated for some time by Israeli and American officials. Biden reiterated that Hamas had beheaded babies at a press conference in November 2023. In response, the Washington Post published a fact check concluding that the story still warranted caution.[18] Biden again repeated this same falsehood on December 12, 2023 (after Haaretz published its investigation), again saying that he had seen photos showing the beheading of babies, being criticized this time by The Intercept.[16] Israeli officials also produced a video purportedly documenting the actions of Palestinian militants on October 7, including "murder, beheadings, rapes and other atrocities against Jewish adults and children." The footage was shown around the world, but only to select audiences and is not available to the general public. British journalist Owen Jones, who attended a screening, reported that although it contained images of an Israeli soldier who was apparently beheaded, "there was no footage substantiating allegations of torture, sexual violence, and mass beheadings, including of babies or other children" (The Intercept's paraphrase).[19]
Although the Israeli government press office confirmed to Le Monde prior to the release of its April 2024 investigation that the baby beheadings did not in fact take place either in Kfar Aza or in any other kibbutz, the French newspaper estimates that Israeli officers maintain an attitude of opportunistic ambiguity towards the rumour, with the intention to "muddy the waters", concluding that Israel has "more often tried to instrumentalize it than deny it, fueling accusations of media manipulation."[1]
At some moments, the Israeli military took contradictory attitudes, sometimes saying it had no confirmation of the killings or beheadings of babies, but then affirming them as fact at other times.[1] At one point, the IDF refused to confirm the beheadings simply because so doing would be "disrespectful for the dead."[8] Israeli embassies around the world helped spread the story, sometimes castigating skeptics as anti-Semitic.[1] When approached by Le Monde, Israel's embassy in France took one post it made on X directly mentioning the hoax down, but left two others indirectly referencing it up.[1]
The falsehoods, once exposed, were also exploited by pro-Palestinian influencers to falsely exonerate Hamas from blame for any violence against civilians on October 7. In Israel, however, belief in the hoax is still widespread, and denying that Hamas mass killed babies on October 7 is seen as tantamount to denying the massacre itself.[1]
The story of the beheaded babies has helped shape government attitudes to the pro-Palestinian movement in the west, with protest bans and other forms of attacks on civil liberties becoming a common feature of Western governments' response to popular anger over the war on Gaza.[20]
Critics of western media and foreign policy, such as Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi, have pointed to the political and media hysteria provoked by the hoax to underscore the hypocrisy and double standards adopted by the West in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, comparing it to the virtually nonexistent reactions to real images of Palestinian children killed or beheaded as a result of the war launched by Israel against the Gaza Strip after the Hamas attack.[21][non-primary source needed]
For Declassified UK, the stories about decapitated babies ended up serving as justification for statements by Israeli officials containing genocidal intent, making them seem less extreme in context.[9] The hoax "laid the basis for genocide; for politicians to look at pictures of Palestinian children, decapitated by US-manufactured missiles, and just shrug", commented Mahdawi.[21]
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