Beheaded Israeli Babies
A plethora of newspapers sharing the phony story of Hamas beheading babies
Rather early on in the Hamas invasion of Israel it was shared rather vehemently that Hamas had beheaded upwards of 40 Israeli infants, naturally this story was plastered across newspapers and news sites by "journalists" who spread the story with no real critical analysis of these claims, sooner rather than later though this story began to become heavily questioned by a plethora of organizations and was inevitably revealed as a complete hoax, an article by Declassified UK sheds light on this topic:
"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.
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.
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 tale of beheaded Israeli infants will go down in the history books as just another piece of atrocity propaganda up there with the likes of the Nayirah Testimony, The Crucified Boy, Saddam Hussein's People Shredder, The Crucified Soldier and many, many, many more cases.
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