There’s perhaps no more serious a time for journalists to do their jobs responsibly than during a war.
But corporate media have not been, as evidenced by their repetition of the shocking, unsubstantiated claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies in its violent attack on a kibbutz in southern Israel on October 7.
It all started with television reporting by journalist Nicole Zedek, who works for the 24-hour Israeli cable news channel i24, now embedded with the Israeli Defense Forces. In one October 10 report, she said, “I’m talking to some of the soldiers, and they say what they’ve witnessed…babies, their heads cut off.” In another report later that day, she says, “About 40 babies at least were taken out on gurneys,” prompting the host to interject: “Nicole, I have to cut in—that’s such a shocking, jarring statement there…. You’re saying 40 babies, dead babies?”
Zedek’s reporting was cobbled together into the viral claim that 40 babies were beheaded, despite that, by her own account, she had not seen the bodies herself, and relied solely on Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers as her sources. This might not have mattered as much if she were reporting on a less inflammatory subject, or had a more reliable source, but the IDF is known for misleading journalists.
The next day, Zedek told a podcast (Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, 10/11/23) that “it’s sickening” that people were scrutinizing her reporting of alleged baby beheadings closely: “We have these soldiers confirming what they’ve seen of the mutilation of these children.”
The claim remains up on i24’s website, as of October 18. Israel’s largest newspaper Ha’aretz (12/2/19) found in a 2019 investigation that i24 had compromised its integrity years earlier by becoming more pro-Netanyahu in order to obtain a broadcast license. It also reputedly has close ties to the Israeli military (Anadolu Ajansi, 10/11/23).
Amplifying the claim
Business Insider (10/10/23): “A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces told Insider on Tuesday that its soldiers found the decapitated corpses of babies…although he hadn’t seen images or videos himself.”
But Zedek and i24 alone could not have produced the flood of social media posts about 40 decapitated babies. That took other outlets amplifying her “reporting” within hours, lending it further credibility and helping it go viral. Some typical headlines:
- “IDF Says Hamas Fighters Killed and Decapitated Babies at One Kibbutz Near the Gaza Border” (Business Insider, 10/10/23)
- “Hamas kills 40 Babies and Children—Beheading Some of Them—at Israeli Kibbutz: Report” (New York Post, 10/10/23)
- “Israeli Forces Say They’ve Uncovered Evidence of Brutal Killings: ‘They Cut Heads of Children’” (The Hill, 10/10/23)
The British Daily Mail (10/10/23) got it all into the headline:
Hamas Terrorists “Beheaded Babies During Kibbutz Slaughter Where 40 Young Children Were Killed”: IDF Soldiers Reveal Families Were Killed in Their Bedrooms—”Not in War, Not a Battlefield… a Massacre'”
Later in the day, a Turkish news outlet (Anadolu Ajansi, 10/10/23) did what Zedek and others should have done in the first place, reporting the story rather than just repeating the sources’ claims. It called the Israeli Defense Forces and found that the military would not confirm the account—a minimal step that Zedek and the many outlets that repeated her claims should have taken, given the gravity of the charges.
But the damage had been done; by Wednesday, nearly a dozen British newspapers ran the i24 claims on their front pages. The Israeli government picked up the story and ran with it too, even as it wouldn’t confirm it. Eventually, US President Biden was caught saying that he had seen photos of decapitated infants when he had not; the White House was forced to issue an embarrassing “clarification.”
Why does it matter?
Reuters (10/13/23): “There were no images to suggest militants had beheaded babies—a particularly explosive accusation that first emerged in Israel’s media and initially confirmed by Israeli officials.”
So we have a story, and that story was generated in a grossly irresponsible way, and then repeated over and over. But what proof do we have that the story is false? After all, even if it was reported badly, and repeated without additional substantiation, it might be true.
Aside from the questionable nature of the sourcing, there is circumstantial evidence that it is false. The Israeli government released horrific images of dead infants over social media (Reuters, 10/13/23). None of the photos showed any evidence of decapitated infants. If the Israeli government had proof that such a horrifying crime had been committed, and was willing to release other traumatic photos of dead infants, surely it would have also released the ones that backed up its claims?
Even with all this said, why does it matter? After all, other horrific crimes were committed in southern Israel. It matters because the war in Gaza was already underway when i24 reported on the “decapitated babies” story—about 260 children were killed in the Gaza Strip as of October 10 (AP, 10/10/23). To maintain lockstep international support, the IDF needed to differentiate its mass slaughter from Hamas’s violence—which it could only do by painting Hamas as sadistic, savage, subhuman. The claim about beheading babies was ideal for the job: a shocking story that served to turn off logic and critical thinking. Who wouldn’t want to avenge murdered, desecrated infants?
Such stories have worked in the past; when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, George H.W. Bush repeated the claims of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti teen that she had seen Iraqi soldiers take babies in Kuwait out of incubators and leave them to die (Democracy Now!, 12/5/18). The teenager later turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, and her claims to be fabrications orchestrated by a DC public relations firm hired by the Kuwaiti government.
In addition, the Israeli government explicitly attempted to draw an equation between Hamas and ISIS, noted for their use of decapitation as a tactic. This aspect of the claim evokes stereotypes of “barbaric” Muslims.
By credulously repeating the soldiers’ claims and Zedek’s reporting on them, countless outlets around the world have contributed to these harms. And the people who have suffered the most in the process are the million-plus children of Gaza.
Playing severed head games
Associated Press & Reuters is the largest news media outlet in the world and owned by the Rothchild Family. The Rothchild’s are Zionists….not Jews.
I wonder they played the instigating role in trying to,” Manufacture Consent” ?
https://www.eutimes.net/2009/03/reuters-and-the-associated-press-are-owned-by-the-rothschild-family/
Retired
UAW / CAW & TCA / Unifor Local 199
Canada
By the same token, had the explosion at the hospital in Gaza which killed nearly 500 been caused by an errant Hamas rocket, would that necessitate the Israelis forging an “intercepted conversation” if it were indeed true and not in actual fact a targeted bombing by an IDF airburst explosive, as is much more likely?
100%. I have never seen a Palestinian rocket leave a blast radius larger than 10 feet in over twenty years and they don’t make that whooshing sound that military-grade missiles make. Don’t believe your lying eyes.
Soon as I heard this ‘report’ I thought of the blatantly false stories (to gen anger against Saddam and bolster the pretext for a war of US aggression in the early 90’s) all the M$M repeated many times re Saddam’s troops murdering babies in incubators?
Turned out that story came from the daughter (or niece) of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US..she cried crocodile tears in (false) testimony to US Congress..all a ploy created by a PR firm working on behalf of Pres. George Bush..Papa-Bush, who wanted war in/against Iraq..his Ambassador to Iraq had previously been told to tell Saddam the US had no interest in his/Saddam’s interest in part of Kuwait–basically luring Saddam into invading Kuwait..
First casualty of War = The Truth.
There have been reports of involvement of top leaders and beurocrats in arrival of large quantities of gold with Islamic books, in Keral, India from a gulf country. Bribing key persons and policy makers is to influence whole society including intellectuals and media persons. Under influence of largesse from groups working for islamisation, these dishonest and greedy pseudo seculars can not speak or write about long ongoing atrocities of jihadis .
What a piece of trash this is! There are pictures of beheaded babies, we have reporters there as well.
And the hospital? Get your facts straight. You can see the roquer where it originated and where it landed. In hospital parking lot.
Yea, more so, this ‘bomb’ didn’t even crack or break the solar panels mounted on the hospital roof. Doesn’t pass the smell test.
Hyperbaric munition carried by Hellfire missile launched from a drone. Intended to aim at mouth of tunnels in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. They explode in the air, suck all the oxygen up, and suffocate those in the tunnel or surrounding.
Did you personally inspect the solar panels for tiny cracks?
Which is more immoral.
To tell lies by accident or on purpose?
Show us those pictures!!
This is about a technicality concerning the vile acts of terror Hamas carried out that day. They burned babies, they killed babies, they mutilated babies and kidnapped babies. They may not have decapitated 40 of them but they killed at least that many. So your point is uselessly moot.
It is undeniable that Hamas committed war crimes in the days after their attack began. It is also undeniable that the apartheid State of Israel has been committing similar crimes on a far greater scale since before the Nakba of 1948. What is your point, exactly?
“The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when around 130 fighters from the Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi [which had earlier tried to form an alliance with Nazi Germany] killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, in Deir Yassin, a village of roughly 600 people near Jerusalem, despite having earlier agreed to a peace pact.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre
What are we to believe, given our current hyperbolic media coverage or, truly, has it ever been any different?
An exception without distinction … Any other parsing ?? Clearly the lunatics are running the asylum here.
‘New York Magazine Intelligencer features writer Eric Levitz responded Sunday to backlash over a post he made on whether babies were actually “beheaded” or not in Israel by Hamas terrorists, where he said it wasn’t fully proven that occurred.’
“According to this report,” Levitz wrote in response to an investigation by an international team of forensic pathologists, “Hamas militants tied a parent and child together and then burned them alive.”
“Last night, I asserted that this report indicated that babies were beheaded,” Levitz wrote on Sunday. “This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them.”
This is even worse because the media is still lying about a Palestinian rocket killing all of those people at the hospital. There has never been such a powerful bottle rocket fired by the Palestinians in over 20 years. The media is telling me to believe my lying eyes.
Your are disgusting. With love from all of your Jewish friends you grew up with.
The followup stories in the press stated that the babies were burnt beyond recognition. How do we know that it was not the IDF killing and burning Palestinian babies? Some of
the accounts of a massacre at the music festival, by people who attended the festival and were interviewed by CNN, eg, fellow named Weinstein, were not believable. People were certainly killed at the two kibbutzes, but how many actually died is being lied about by the IDF. One of the earlier articles stated that the IDF killed 400 Hamas inside of Israel after the initial attack. While the ‘other’ Hamas escaped with the hostages across the border? My question, did the IDF kill Palestianian citizens in Israel as retaliation, or did they kill bonafide Hamas? The United States should not be selling F-35 jets to Israel, if they use them to indiscrimately kill Gaza citizens as well as Hamas. These are war crimes by Israel, and should be treated as such. Israel is bombing targets in Syria and Lebanon, trying to start World War III, and should be stopped immediately by the United States.
Israel has been bombing other nations for a long time too—-and their Israeli awfulness began in 1948 with murdering Palestinians. In fact, LOL, Israel began Hamas…but oh the irony—it can be delicious.
Netanyahu is a war criminal, and so —–when America will the truth telling begin?
Why does it matter? That this was confirmed by now. Why do facts matter? Did you know that Saurav Sarkar grew up in the gorgeous suburb of Great Neck with many Jewish friends and teachers who adored him?