The ‘beheaded babies’ allegation
JVL Introduction
Evidence that atrocities are often committed in war abounds and there is no a priori reason to disbelieve them.
But at least some evidence is required. Not it turns out for the lurid claim, made within days of October 7, that “40 babies/children were beheaded”.
Broadcast by an Israeli channel, it was echoed by Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as media worldwide but none more enthusiastically than those in Britain which first amplified the story.
It was immediately sanctified as “the truth” about Hamas’s irrational cruelty.
There was no evidence to support the claim. What stands out is the media’s enthusiasm to believe it without even attempting to verify it.
Jewdas has commented: “We actually have a handy phrase for false accusations of ritualised infanticide to justify violence and dispossession: Blood Libel.”
RK
PS: Al Jazeera posted a Fact Check on this story soon after it appeared which we missed at the time. We link to its video below.
This article was originally published by Declassified UK on Thu 4 Jan 2024. Read the original here.
‘Beheaded babies’ – How UK media reported Israel’s fake news as fact
Britain’s national press have been indispensable allies of Israel throughout its brutal war on Gaza.
The assertion that during Hamas’ attack in southern Israel on 7 October babies were beheaded gained traction almost immediately.
On the morning of 10 October, Israeli news channel i24 claimed it had received confirmation from soldiers that “40 babies/children were beheaded”.
On that same day, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) repeated the claim to Business Insider that soldiers had found decapitated babies.
This precise language was echoed the next day by the spokesperson of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to CNN.
US president Joe Biden also announced he’d seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading babies”.
When the IDF was questioned about those claims on that same day, it said it would not investigate and insisted testimonies from soldiers amounted to sufficient evidence.
There was therefore still a cloud of doubt surrounding the story.
On Sky News’ “press preview” on the evening of 10 October, the presenter emphasised that Sky had asked the IDF on three occasions to confirm those reports – each time with no success. She added that Sky’s chief correspondent on the ground, Stewart Ramsey, could not corroborate them either.
But the story had already made the front page of the majority of British newspapers.
‘Holocaust plain and simple’
The Daily Mail called it a “holocaust plain and simple”. “Hamas cut the throats of babies”, read The Times front page. The Metro ran with “40 babies murdered by Hamas”.
“Hamas massacres women and children” reported the Telegraph whilst the Daily Express exhibited horror at the “pure evil beheading of babies”, on a day the British press was uncommonly united.
“They decapitated women and children” was the Independent’s headline. (The paper’s reporter later deleted the post on X that regurgitated that claim but the “special dispatch” on the beheaded babies is still on the Independent’s website).
The story also featured heavily in the broadcast realm on 11 October, with little room for any view of a conflicting nature.
On LBC, presenter Iain Dale expressed disgust at a caller who did not condemn what Dale referred to as “what Hamas did” including their “beheading babies” and furiously took him off air.
What started as a claim from Israeli military and media circles that lacked certainty was instantly transformed into an established fact by virtually the entire British media.
No evidence
In subsequent days, journalists at the scene in Israel continued to investigate the validity of the beheaded babies story. A French journalist in Kfar Aza reported that nobody had mentioned beheaded children to him.
Meanwhile, Oren Ziv, a prominent Israeli journalist, highlighted he had not seen any evidence to support the claims before adding that Israeli soldiers and the army’s spokesperson remained unable to confirm the allegations.
The White House quickly walked back on Biden’s earlier claim. It reiterated he had not in fact seen evidence of the beheaded babies he was convinced of less than 36 hours ago, making clear that the president’s comments were merely repeating Israeli news reports and officials.
However, there was little detectable appetite from the British media to change tack and report on this clarification in the ongoing story.
In fact, the newspapers had moved on completely. The zealous willingness to examine in scrupulous detail atrocities taking place on the ground and describing in vivid terms the violent acts, spectacularly disappeared.
Nor was there a lack of information to report on. By the time one week had passed since 7 October, more than 2,000 Palestinians had been murdered by Israel’s relentless military bombardment. At least 720 of them were children and around 450 were women.
But by this point, the British media had ditched the graphic images and were no longer interested in being the arbiters of what constitutes a massacre or terrorism and there was palpably no longer a need to make that clear to the public.
Same hymn sheet
One investigation looked at four weeks of BBC One’s daytime coverage of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza starting from 7 October.
It found journalists drew on the words “murder”, “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” a total of 52 times to refer to Israelis’ deaths – but never in relation to Palestinian deaths.
So Israel can exaggerate or fabricate claims, paving the way for an unrelenting operation of ethnic cleansing, safe in the knowledge British media will sing from the same hymn sheet.
“Erase them and their families. These animals can no longer live”. Those were the chilling words of advice from 95-year-old Israeli army reservist Ezra Yachin as Israeli forces prepared to invade Gaza.
After the British media unambiguously asserted babies were beheaded, the genocidal intent from Israeli officials is likely to be perceived less as an extreme call for mass murder and more a justified response.
The process of automatically regurgitating claims not only constitutes an abandonment of the basic principles of journalism – like fact checking, accuracy and objectivity – but also helps legitimise Israel’s violence.
Command and control
The Israeli military stormed Gaza’s main hospital, Al-Shifa, in mid-November under the premise it was being used as a Hamas command centre sitting atop underground tunnels operated by militants.
Israel’s claims were again rehashed by portions of the media.
The Telegraph echoed that Israeli soldiers found a Hamas tunnel, the Times declared weapons had been found in the hospital and an LBC online article cited the Israeli army’s claim that it was being “precise” in what they labelled a Hamas hunt.
However, in December, an independent Washington Post investigation concluded the evidence presented by the Israeli government and army fell short of satisfactorily showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command centre or that there was any military use in the facility.
Until Israel’s claims are no longer treated as the unvarnished truth by the mainstream media, there can be no claim to impartial journalism and little resistance to the accusations of their complicity in the genocide in Gaza.
Hamza Ali Shah is a British-Palestinian writer and journalist whose work focuses on Palestine. He has reported on daily life under occupation for Palestinians including home demolitions and forced expulsion and the conditions for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. He has also extensively covered the British political establishment’s legislation and policies towards Palestine. He has also contributed to Tribune Magazine, Jacobin, +972 Magazine and New Internationalist.
Did Hamas behead babies? I Fact Check
Al Jazeera, date given on YouTube as “2 months ago”
In this Fact Check, Al Jazeera’s @rawaak tracks the origin and the spread of fake claims about the beheading of children in Kfar Aza.
The 84 page South Africa genocide case against Israel highlights a consistent pattern over more than 10 years of Israel making broadly similar claims recklessly or in a deliberately untruthful way to “excuse” its attacks on protected facilities and people (hospitals, civilians, etc). The text quotes a long trail of evidence, witness statements and official judgements disproving a number of Israel’s claims.
If South Africa wins its case (next week?) then Western media will be forced to recognise they cannot trust ANYTHING the Israeli government, IDF or settlers say without fact checking it rigorously, at the time the allegation is made. The scope for deceit will be much more limited.
You could also highlight this appalling information from Middle East Eyehttps://www.middleeasteye.net/news/war-gaza-survivors-recount-harrowing-israeli-field-executions. Several separate incidents are described, each of which are as heinous as the actions of Hamas on October 7.
IDF soldiers shot at point blank range 7 members of one family, including an elderly man and a pregnant woman in their home.
A six year old describes the gunning down of his mother and father in front of him. He was hit as well.
Another man was shot in front of his severely disabled adult children (one of whom was Deaf) as he tried to explain they did not understand the soldiers commands.
Two girls aged 8 and 15 were shot dead as they tried to flee a building under attack.
Whole families have been shot (not bombed) Executed at close quarters.
The British mainstream media have not picked up on this report, which is eye witness testimony.
Because the Israeli army is doing all it can to minimise civilian casualties….
The sad fact is, that once a part of the information – used by the ultra-right, ultra-racist and ultra-fascist ultra-Eretz-Israel settler colonial Zionist Netanyahu cabinet, to start off an unprecedented genocidal ethnic cleansing (Nakba 3.0) of the Gazan Ghetto – has been falsified as untrue, the immediate question should arise, what else of the initial information provided for by the very same source, can be considered valid.
I am of course referring to the claims by many media-outlets of mass-rapes and decapacitating breasts by Hamas from the alleged women-victims. No one seemed to have come up with the idea, of actually filming the bodies of those women, and nobody seems to have been prepared of actually registering the details of the alleged crimes, such as collecting the semen of the rapists.
We might then as well mention the claims about mass-killings of Hamas among the Rave-festival goers : What part of the dead youngsters had been killed by members of Hamas, and what part had been killed by the IDF helicopter-gunships, that allegedly had been shooting indiscriminately members of Hamas and the youngsters fleeing the festival alike. Apparently none of the bodies had been examined by certified medical personal / coroners, and all the bodies have been buried as soon as possible, and so has the incriminating evidence (*).
Do remember in the very same context – of the art of manufacturing content in order to manufacture consent – that shortly after the reported 10/7 occurrences, official representatives of the Israeli government at the UN had taken a picture of themselves, waring the so-called Judenstern (Davidstar), that had been used by the criminal nazi’s during 1933-1945, in order to distinguish, the Jewish prisoners of their concentration / death-camps, from other categories of prisoners (**).
(*) https://www.liberationnews.org/evidence-shows-israel-killed-many-of-its-own-citizens-on-oct-7-then-blamed-hamas/
(**) https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/classification-system-in-nazi-concentration-camps
@ Robert Bleeker (and anyone else interested!)
I use the simple “Gaza news” search term, setting Tools to searching for information within the last 24 hours. That approach has helped me find a series of information sources (mainstream media and specialist ones too) less gullible and better informed than much of UK media coverage. One still needs to be very wary and prepared to read between the lines …
I often find media coverage and links from the following sources illuminating:-
Al Jazeera (generally very good)
Haaretz (braver and more wide-ranging than the UK’s “Guardian” in what it’s prepared to cover)
Middle East Monitor
Sky
Swawkbox (and Canary)
The Israeli equivalents to the UK’s “Daily Telegraph” (titles may be mis-remembered – the “Jerusalem Post” and “Jerusalem Times”?) seem well informed on the difficult relationships within the Netanyahu government and between it and the IDF and public. As a “house divided against itself cannot stand” (particularly when pressures are extreme), reports from these media will be especially worth reading now.