TL;DR SUMMARY: Just one Israeli baby was killed on October 7th, 10-month-old Mila Cohen. She was not ‘beheaded’, ‘strung up on a clothesline’, or ‘cooked in an oven’. Mila shot in her mother’s arms in Kibbutz Be’eri. (Sources: Ha’aretz and Times of Israel). But if you’re interested in seeing the journey to one baby killed from “40 beheaded babies”, read on.
While Internet claims of HAMAS atrocities perpetrated against Israeli babies had circulated from October 7, the “HAMAS beheaded 40 babies” story started to spread in earnest after the IDF arranged a October 10 tour for foreign journalists of the Kfar Aza town in Israel.
i24NEWS, an Israeli TV channel that has an English service broadcast around the world, was one of the first TV reports from Kfar Aza. Reporter Nicole Zedek told the i24NEWS anchor “They [the IDF] don’t even have the exact number of who was killed here.” Despite the published YouTube headline (screenshot above), which says “Kfar Aza massacre: HAMAS beheaded women and babies,” the closest the report comes to mentioning babies is a roll call of the kinds of victims that were killed (screenshot below). There is no mention of “beheaded babies.”
In a longer report from the live i24NEWS broadcast (embedded below), Correspondent Nicole Zedek does make reference to ’40 beheaded babies’, attributing that figure to an IDF commander present.
This shorter video, extracted from i24NEWS live coverage (note the presence of chyrons on screen), is titled “Kfar Aza massacre: HAMAS beheaded women and babies—but mentions none and depicts none. According to the Internet Archive, this video title has remained consistent since the morning of October 10th.
This misrepresentation could be explained by an unintentional error by a staffer who wasn’t the headline author or video editor—just the person who uploaded it. Yet, the fact that this headline was put out on content that simply didn’t support it—that the error occurred at all—gives insight into i24NEWS’s rabid October 10th push for this particular ‘fact’ to be widely disseminated.
i24NEWS’s description on its October 10th YouTube video titled “Kfar Aza massacre: Hamas beheaded women and babies” reads: “i24NEWS Correspondent Nicole Zedek takes us through the scene of devastation in Kfar Aza, the community massacred by Hamas terrorist infiltrators, as the IDF works to remove the bodies of the victims from the homes where they were murdered.”
Zedek’s i24NEWS article does mention ‘beheadings’, starting with the article’s subheader, which states: “Soldiers encounter unimaginable horrors as they remove the bodies of victims, including babies and small children — some with their heads chopped off.”
Later, the article text adds:
“Many soldiers were called up for reserve service, and could be seen actively consoling each other after what they had to witness. They arrived expecting the worst, but the scenes are beyond anything that one could imagine. Some soldiers say they found babies with their heads cut off, entire families gunned down in their beds. Multiple babies and young children have been taken out on gurneys — so far.”
The i24NEWS website updated the article on November 30th, adding the following note:
Editor’s Note, November 30, 2023: As the official numbers become clearer, we are correcting our initial report.Since the massacre on October 7, i24NEWS journalists have collected eyewitness accounts from Gaza’s border communities, IDF soldiers, and rescue services. Our initial report from the scene of the massacre was given during an official IDF tour to foreign journalists and was based on the testimony of officers who were among the first to arrive at the scene. Later, these numbers were supported by additional testimonies, including search and rescue volunteers from ZAKA and other emergency services.
Looking at the first posted copy of the article on the Internet Archive, you can see why this change was made. In i25NEWS’s original posted version, the phrase “about 40” can be found:
“Soldiers encounter unimaginable horrors as they remove the bodies of victims, including about 40babies and small children — some with their heads chopped off.”
The original text of the article’s second mention of beheaded babies (quoted above) also reflects the same correction:
“Many soldiers were called up for reserve service, and could be seen actively consoling each other after what they had to witness. They arrived expecting the worst, but the scenes are beyond anything that one could imagine. Some soldiers say they found babies with their heads cut off, entire families gunned down in their beds. About 40 babies and young children have been taken out on gurneys — so far.“
i24NEWS’s correction basically just removes the number “40”, still leaving us with “babies and small children — some with their heads chopped off” in the subheader and “babies with their heads cut off” later in the article text. Even after the removal of the numerical estimate, we are still led to believe that babies and small children were ‘beheaded.’
i24NEWS’s anchor that day, Benita Levin, was another helper with the misinformation spread. The full video of i24NEWS’s live broadcast is longer but YouTube embeds don’t allow for a specific start point. This link takes you to the middle of the video and the beginning of her report, beginning at roughly 24:30 mins into the full video: https://www.youtube.com/live/RKc9ESIEMpw?si=EahWoi9Hc9FLCM5D&t=1454
In the introduction to Nicole Zedek’s report, Levin said: “Earlier in the day, heartbreaking, heart wrenching images, the release of horrifying footage—images of 40 children and toddlers slaughtered in the kibbutz of Kfar Aza on Saturday.”
Levin’s introduction refers to “images” or “footage” (highlighted above) of dead babies. The subsequent footage broadcast from i24NEWS Correspondent Nicole Zedek—as with the other report embedded above—shows no beheaded babies or even dead children of any kind.
Perhaps the best evidence of the power of Israel’s October 7th propaganda was how the US President—already responsible for providing Israel’s existing stockpile of weapons to misuse in Gaza and now responsible for continuing to supply them, sometimes even behind the back of Congress—not only repeated and amplified the lies but even claimed to have personally seen photographic evidence that did not exist, of something that never happened.
ON OCTOBER 11, four days after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel, President Joe Biden addressed a group of Jewish community leaders in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” Biden said. “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.”
Biden had seen no such pictures, nor received any such confirmation. He made those comments after Nicole Zedeck, a journalist for Israel’s i24 News, reported that 40 babies had been decapitated, citing Israeli soldiers at the scene of the attacks at Kfar Aza. A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently stated that babies and toddlers had been found with their “heads decapitated.”
Three hours later, Biden promoted the claim to the world and asserted he personally saw pictures of the horrifying scene, giving the story supreme legitimacy.
Middle East Eye looks into it on October 10th
CNN reports on October 12 that the Israeli government cannot confirm babies were beheaded in Hamas attack
Jerusalem, CNN—The Israeli government has not confirmed the specific claim that Hamas attackers cut off the heads of babies during their shock attack on Saturday, an Israeli official told CNN, contradicting a previous public statement by the Prime Minister’s office.
“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 said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that people had been beheaded by Hamas in an appearance beside Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday, but did not specify if they were children.
His office later released what it described as “horrifying photos of babies murdered and burned by the Hamas monsters.”
The three photos showed two babies whose bodies had been burned beyond recognition and a third infant’s bloodstained body. The post said that Netanyahu showed Blinken the photos, as well as others.
The explosive allegations that children had been decapitated at the kibbutz of Kfar Aza emerged Tuesday in Israeli media. Israel Defense Forces later described the scene as a “massacre” in a statement to CNN. Women, children toddlers and the elderly were “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action,” the IDF said.
Tal Heinrich, a spokeswoman for Netanyahu, said on Wednesday that babies and toddlers had been found with their “heads decapitated” in Kfar Aza.
US President Joe Biden appeared to confirm that information. In a roundtable with Jewish community leaders on Wednesday, he said: “I have been doing this a long time, I never really thought that I would see… have confirmed pictures of terrorist beheading children.”
A US administration official later clarified Biden’s remarks, telling CNN that neither Biden nor his aides had seen pictures or had received confirmed reports of children or infants having been beheaded by Hamas. The official clarified that Biden was referring to public comments from media outlets and Israeli officials.
An IDF spokesman, Jonathan Conricus, later in the day said terrorists had likely carried out decapitations of babies in the Be’eri kibbutz.
“We got very very 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,” he said.
Israeli officials initially avoided discussing the specifics of how its citizens were killed. They instead likened Hamas’ brutality to that of ISIS, the Sunni terror group that beheaded captives and burned prisoners alive.
Almost two months later on December 3rd, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz finally debunks the worst atrocity claims, critically addressing the actual number of babies killed—one
Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published a Hebrew article on 3 December 2023 debunking the worst of the claims about nonexistent atrocities committed against babies.
The Hebrew version of the article headline read as follows (via Google Translate):
The English version of the article (link to full archived version)—released the following day on 4 December 2023—radically changed the Hebrew article’s initial framing, clearly a reaction to Google translations of the previous day’s Hebrew article being widely forwarded around the world, often deployed as blanket proof that ‘Israel made everything up.’
It should be noted that the original Hebrew article and the English translation both debunk false atrocity claims that continue to be widely shared and repeated:
The English version of Ha’aretz‘s article (link to full archived version) is important to read as it goes through all of the various fake atrocity stories and debunks them all.
The key part that invalidates all of the gruesome baby atrocity stories:
It was admission that the world had been waiting for
🚨Important! Haaretz definitively debunks iconic horror stories from Oct 7: 40 beheaded babies Baby burned in oven A pregnant woman's stomach opened & her fetus removed Children bound together & burned Pregnant hostage giving birth
The TL;DR version of the Ha’aretz article is that IDF soldiers lied, Israeli rescue organization staff and volunteers lied, other soldiers and journalists conflated those lies with some realities, Netanyahu’s office energetically distributed the demonizing propaganda, and the combination flowed onto the pages of the world’s media and into the ears of the President of the United States—who acted on them.
“As we had said from the very start, and repeatedly since then, outrageous official Israeli lies serve a function, and cannot be dismissed as typical Israeli propaganda. Considering the horrid nature of these lies, we predicted that the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza would be more devastating than ever. Netanyahu’s lies were intended to create a moral cover for the massacres that were yet to be perpetrated against innocent Palestinian civilians.”
“In fact, this turned out to be the case. Even when these lies have proven to be false, many are still using them as fodder for the genocide in Gaza while others are still debating their ‘authenticity’. All of this is occupying time and space within a discourse that should have been focused completely on the atrocious Israeli holocaust in Gaza.”
Other media personalities followed in late January 2024, when the coast was clear to bravely retweet other people saying it
Remarkable. An Israeli TV host & his 3 Israeli guests discuss, dissect, and debunk some of the awful lies that were told about what happened on Oct 7th (beheaded babies, etc) live on Israeli TV. 👇🏽
A 17 March 2024 Twitter thread on the key roles of New Lines’ Lisa Goldman and Media Matters’ Matthew Gerz in spreading the beheaded babies myth
Once you know that only one baby was killed on October 7, Lisa Goldman’s claim to have seen photos of beheaded babies “with my own eyes”, and the claims of the heads of Israel’s Forensic Pathology Center Chen Kugel and DNA team Nurit Bublil are also implicated by their statements to the media.
As Zei Squirrel notes on Twitter, “Dr. Chen Kugel, Israel’s chief forensic pathologist who handled all the October 7 bodies, doing an atrocity propaganda video together with other proven hoaxer Shari Mendes, who claimed to have seen a non-existent fetus ripped out of a womb.”
As well as claiming he worked on October 7 victims whose ages “spanned from 3 months to 90 years”, Kugel’s history isn’t much better. The former army intelligence officer was also involved in other propaganda operations, including efforts to cover up an Israeli sniper’s killing of British photographer Tom Hurndall.
Matt
on October 10 Lisa Goldman, who is a contributing editor at New Lines Magazine, made a post which reached at least half a million people saying that she personally saw with her own eyes beheaded babies. No such photo exists. She intentionally spread genocidal atrocity propaganda pic.twitter.com/x0gawGZgxL
April 10th thread by former Wall Street Journal reporter Dion Nissenbaum
1/The Fog of War: Beheaded Babies. Six months ago today, a series of reputable news outlets published reports that Hamas militants had beheaded babies at the Kfar Aza kibbutz on Oct. 7 in southern Israel. The @WSJ was not one of them.
Note: This article has been updated with new content at various points after its original publication on 19 December 2023, including on 24 January, 17 March, and 10 April 2024.
Scottish OG from the time of the First Intifada and the birth of the international movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people • Former Friends of Birzeit University Coordinator • Birzeit University Public Relations Officer • Cofounder and Editor of the original Electronic Intifada website • Creator of countless websites for pro-Palestinian organizations around the world via nigelparry.net
