Following Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, killing over a thousand civilians, rendering hundreds of thousands homeless and cutting off the water, food, international aid, electricity, and fuel to what Israel’s Defense Minister called “human animals” in Gaza, an immense focus has been placed upon the nature of the initial Hamas attack against Israel. By now you have probably heard claims of “40 beheaded babies”, “raped women”, “burning civilians alive” and other such claims made against Hamas, while the organization is branded “worse than ISIS” by the Israeli government. However, there’s a problem with a lot of these claims, they are completely fabricated.
In the first few days of the war between Israel and Gaza, which was launched following a Hamas surprise attack on Saturday, the Israeli death toll officially reached 1,000. The images and videos that spread around the world were enough to take the Western media and governments by storm, widespread condemnations poured in from almost every single elected official in the US government, while public figures and media personalities weighed in, with some calling for horrendous atrocities in response. In my last piece for The Last American Vagabond, I give some context as to why the Hamas attack happened, which you can read here, however, it is important that we cover the Israeli claims and expose them for what they are at this time.
The 40 “Beheaded Babies” Lie
On Tuesday, the claim that 40 Israeli babies had been murdered by Hamas gunmen, some of them with their heads decapitated, emerged into the mainstream with a live news segment on I24 News. Nicole Zedek, a reporter for I24 News, was the first one to state the claim while on air in the village of Kfar Azza, asserting that it had been told to her by Israeli army witnesses to the alleged tragedy. Yet following some skepticism of the claim, with requests for both clarity and evidence, Zedek began altering and walking back her report, publishing a tweet in which she said that,
“Soldiers told me they believe 40 babies/children were killed. The exact death toll is still unknown”.
During her live report, Nicole Zedek showed the Israeli victims of a Hamas attack in body bags behind her, all were clearly adults with no sight of children or babies in any of the body bags. A report that was published by The Grayzone tracked down the Israeli soldier who claims to have witnessed the dead headless babies, his name is David Ben Zion, who is also a fanatical leader in the illegal settler movement and had helped incite riots against Palestinian villages, calling for one of them to be “wiped out”. Despite there being no verification of the claims made, Western media and politicians repeated them as fact continuously.
The allegation also made it onto CNN, where correspondent Nic Robertson also cited Israeli soldiers as the source for Hamas carrying out “ISIS-style executions,” “cutting the heads off of people,” including that they had done this to pets and babies. Western corporate media, from Fox News to CNN, the allegation made headlines, while in the UK the story was printed on the front pages of the following newspapers: The Times, Metro, The i, Daily Express, The Scotsman, and Financial Times. The LA Times, which originally ran with the story, later retracted the piece, but the other outlets mentioned have not corrected their stories until now.
When Anadolu Agency contacted the Israeli army for clarity on the nature of the beheaded babies claim, they denied having any knowledge of the event. While Israeli journalists who were touring Kafr Azza, like Oren Ziv, have denied the beheaded babies story had any supporting evidence, so too did medical workers according to French journalist Samuel Forey. The Washington Post also reported on Wednesday night, that the US government had not seen or been presented with any evidence of the claims, in their story covering the events in Kafr Azza, they do not mention any accounts of beheading.
Despite this, not only did Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, repeat the claim during a press conference held for the establishment of Israel’s emergency war government, but the President of the United States, Joe Biden, repeated the claim in his address to the world the day prior. He again repeated the claim on Wednesday, stating that “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” which the White House later confirmed the president had not seen. Keep in mind that his office has received no evidence of the claim that came from a radical Israeli religious fundamentalist and was repeated by an Israeli journalist. Also, the US President claimed to have seen the “terrorists beheading children”, so not babies and that would mean that the photos would have been taken by someone watching the atrocity, which would assumably be Hamas as they are accused of committing this crime; meaning they must have filmed themselves doing it, according to Joe Biden.
If true, why not actually produce the evidence, as we already have extremely gruesome footage and photos of Israelis killed that are paraded around throughout social media? Why wouldn’t Israel’s army confirm it or at least allow it to be reported by human rights groups? Also, where are the names, the photos, or the bereaved families of these beheaded babies?
On top of this, Hamas strongly denied the claims made in a public statement that was issued on the matter. Below is their statement in full, which is completely on the reader to make of what they please:
“The Palestinian resistance does not target children, and the Western media must be accurate and not blindly side with the Zionist narrative, which is full of lies and slander. We in the Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] categorically affirm the falsehood of the fabricated allegations promoted by some Western media outlets, which unprofessionally adopt the Zionist narrative full of lies and slander against our Palestinian people and their resistance, the latest of which was the claim of killing children, beheading them, and targeting civilians.
We consider the adoption of this to be biased. The Zionist narrative, without verification, is nothing but a media distraction in an attempt to cover up the crimes of the occupation and its massacres that it commits day and night in Gaza, which amount to war crimes and genocide by targeting civilians and cutting off their electricity, water, food and medical supplies.
The Palestinian resistance and the Qassam Brigades worked to target the Zionist military and security system in the Battle of “Al-Aqsa Flood.” These were legitimate targets, and at the same time they sought to avoid civilians. This was witnessed by many video field clips, and many settlers spoke about this with video testimonies through the media.
Those Western media outlets that are biased toward the Zionist narrative were unable to mention the extent of the Zionist crime against our people in the Gaza Strip, which completely wiped out entire neighbourhoods and bombed residential buildings over the heads of their residents, leading to the death of 950 Palestinian civilians so far, including 260 children and 230 women, who were killed. All of us, without warning, in a Zionist crime that can only be described as genocide and war crimes. Accordingly, we call on those Western media outlets to be objective and professional in reporting and media coverage of the course of the Zionist aggression, and not to blatantly and blindly adopt the Zionist narrative.”
The statement issued by Hamas was released on October 11. It accurately noted the copious examples of body-cam footage, CCTV footage and video filmed on phones, where the Palestinian fighters avoided killing unarmed people, also correctly pointing out that Israelis who were held hostage have talked in depth about the fighters treating them humanely. However, there are videos and photos of Israelis from the settlements that were gunned down, which have not received any explanation and so could have very well been killed by some fighters without justification.
What we also have to know about the killing of unarmed Israelis, is that following the initial Hamas incursion into the settlements and military sites, all of the Israeli security forces and army service-members had either been killed, captured, or fled on foot. This is important to note because we have a plethora of examples, on video, of other Palestinian armed groups, in addition to Palestinians who were not part of armed groups, that crossed the separation fence and entered settlement areas. Some of the kidnappings carried out, such as was highlighted by a video that the Qassam Brigades released on Wednesday, were undertaken by Palestinians who were not part of any armed group. In the video that Hamas released through Al-Jazeera, it is made clear that the Qassam Brigades had taken control of a woman and children who had been captured, immediately releasing them back over the border.
The situation became extremely messy, as is also clear from the footage we have. Many Israelis are armed in the settlements, which caused trigger happy behaviour, making it plausible to believe that when presented by a possible threat, the mistake of shooting unarmed people could very well have occurred. At this time, we still do not possess any detailed reports from human rights groups and the investigations have not yet come in to confirm what happened in the various cases presented. It is plausible that some Palestinian fighters could have actively gone wild, shooting anyone in sight, so we should not discount that this happened, but we also must keep in mind that we have no idea which Palestinians killed which Israelis, why they killed them, and whether — as video evidence also suggests — Israeli forces also killed their own people during firefights.
The Killing Of Pregnant Women, Burning Of Civilians, And Rape
One of the most outlandish claims made to date, came from the Executive Editor of Indian media channel TV9, who wrote on Twitter that “A pregnant woman in Southern Israel was found by Hamas terrorists. They dissected her body. Her stomach was cut open and they took the fetus out with the umbilical cord. And let the unborn child die slowly out of his mother’s womb. This is what inhuman savages Hamas do to people.” Not even the Israeli media bothered entertaining this, yet it received over 20k retweets and 32k likes. Initially, the so-called journalist reported this, citing an article that showcased how this very same act had been carried out during the Sabra and Shatila massacre, committed against Palestinian refugees, during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He deleted his initial tweet, then reposted it again, knowing that the core allegation was a lie.
Then there are the claims that Palestinians gathered Israeli civilians and burned them alive, which most of the tweets claiming this are using photos that are confirmed to be of dead Palestinian fighters by Israeli media. Some of these allegations are again so outlandish that not even the Israeli army, nor media, will bother entertaining them, bar a few Israeli state funded media personalities.
As for the allegations of rape, these have been repeated numerous times, without any evidence to back them up. One unverified video of a man held captive, who appears to have been clearly abused, is being questioned and is repeatedly pressured to say that he sought to capture civilians to rape them, however, there is no proof that this man is from any armed group, it wasn’t released by any official Israeli platform, and cannot be taken seriously therefore. This is why the video has not been cited by any major media outlet and was deleted from Twitter.
The most prominent example, in which rape was alleged, was in the case of a German citizen and tattoo artist, Shani Louk. The young woman was shown in a video, laying face first on a vehicle that was driven by Palestinians into the Gaza Strip. The allegations that were produced across social media, and made their way into the mainstream Western press, were that she had been stripped, raped, dragged, and executed, before her body was seized and brought back to the besieged coastal enclave. Well, days after this it was revealed that what she was wearing, appearing to make her seem as if she was in underwear, was in fact the same outfit the woman was wearing to an Israeli festival that day, which we have photographic evidence for. Not only that, it is being reported by Newsweek that she is not dead and is being treated at a hospital inside the Gaza Strip, which Shani Louk’s mother appeared on video to confirm. There is not a single shred of evidence that has been produced to suggest that any Israeli women were raped.
American actress, Jamie Lee Curtis, posted a photo of Palestinian children in Gaza, on her Instagram, with the caption “terror from the skies”, thinking the photo showed Israeli children and used it to side with Israel. Singer, Justin Bieber, also used an image of bombed out buildings in Gaza with a pro-Israel caption, “praying for Israel“, these posts reached their millions of followers, clearly representing cases of blatant misinformation. Both deleted their posts.
Videos were also spread on social media, with allegations that Hamas had captured Israeli children and was holding them in cages. One of the videos was published on Tiktok on October 4, so before the military operation of Hamas and did not depict Israeli children, the other was actually of Palestinian children that were held in cages by the Israeli army in the West Bank city of al-Khalil. There has been zero evidence produced, up until this point, to even back up the claim that a single Israeli child is currently being held captive inside the Gaza Strip.
As for the “festival massacre of over 200 Israeli civilians” at a festival that was being held in close proximity to the Gaza-Israel separation fence. Reports that were produced across Western media have painted the incident as a clear-cut, black and white scenario, which suggested that there was a mass shooting and they simply gunned down festival goers for no reason other than them being Israelis. In this case also, video evidence has emerged that shows Israeli armed security forces firing at Hamas fighters from within a group of Israeli festival goers. There are videos from a number of angles, which appear to show Israeli security forces cowering amongst the unarmed Israelis surrounding them, opening fire from within them, showing clearly that there was an armed clash at the site. So, it is completely plausible that the gunfight could have been one in which many civilians were caught in the crossfire, many potentially killed by Israeli gunfire as well. On social media, some people have argued that what the Israeli forces were doing is tantamount to using civilians as human shields, however, the videos do not provide enough context for this allegation to be taken as factually accurate.
There are quite literally hundreds of completely unfounded and unsubstantiated claims that are being made about the conduct of Palestinian fighters at this time. While there is certainly a wealth of evidence to support the claim that numerous unarmed Israelis were shot dead, there is no truth to these ridiculous allegations of gruesome mutilations and the other unspeakable warcrimes alleged, which were covered above. In this media landscape, where Western media and leaders are repeating the above debunked information, it is expected that the majority of the public will not follow up on the stories and simply accept them as fact, especially when they come from trusted sources. This is why it is so important for us to push back and provide the context to what is really going on and consider all possibilities. The Israeli disinformation campaign is aimed at justifying the horrifying massacres being inflicted on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, where over 1,300 have already been killed, around half of which have been women and children. In 2022, I worked on a piece which debunked Israeli claims — which were also repeated across Western media and by the US representative to the United Nations — that Palestinian rockets had killed most of the children that died in last years onslaught against Gaza. This is a tactic that is routinely used by Israel, to make itself the victim and justify its clear targeting of women and children through its airstrike campaigns.
The terrorists and the Koran explain the rape. Islamists revel in it. If you think it’s disinformation, you might be a Democrat.