40 beheaded babies in Israel: how the news came about and how true it is

When talking about the horrors of the militants' attack on Israel, some argue that four dozen very young children were not only killed, but the participants in the attack cut off their heads. Opponents object: these statements are propaganda and denigration of “fighters for the liberation of Palestine”; there were no beheaded babies. “Verified” tells how this story appeared and gained a foothold in the public sphere and what is currently known about children who died at the hands of militants.

Reports of infants killed by militants, some of whom were beheaded, began spreading on October 10, three days after the Hamas attack on Israel. They wrote about what happened (with reservations about insufficient data) The Insider, "Radio Liberty", "Present tense", TASS and other major media. The story collected millions of views on Telegram - in particular, posts about the massacre and the alleged death of 40 babies were posted by the channels Readovka (969,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), “Beware, news!"(591,000), "Nevzorov" (542,000 And 511,000), Varlamov News (506,000), "Ukraine now: news, war, Russia"(457,000), "Insider UA"(427,000) and Nexta Live (367,000). 

In the evening of the same day, refutations began to appear, which also received a lot of attention from the audience, for example, in the channels Readovka (1.3 million views), "Fisherman" (410,000) and "Russia now"(306,000). TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov wrote an angry rebuke, convicting the media of lies (304,000 views), and on October 11 shared fasting, which Israel is accused of staging, supposedly there were no beheaded children. IN "Komsomolskaya Pravda" a material was published under the heading ""Israeli Butch": The monstrous lie about 40 beheaded babies became a weapon in the war," and "Russian newspaper"Called the story fake. 

Anti-Israeli messages denouncing the killings of children as fakes continued to appear subsequently. October 23 Telegram channel «Fisherman” (321,000 views) stated that “there were no babies among the killed Israelis at all,” and “in principle, a total of 16 children between the ages of 4 and 17 died.” October 25 same information was voiced in a video of the YouTube channel “Mom in a Hat” (90,000 views), the information about the children killed in Kfar Aza was called a fake and later - for example, a TV presenter Ruslan Ostashko (97,000) at the end of November. 

How did the story about 40 beheaded babies come about? 

The authors of most publications refer to the broadcast of the i24News TV channel, in which journalist Nicole Tzedek reports from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, which was attacked by Hamas militants. On social network X (formerly Twitter) video was posted on October 10 at 13:56 Moscow time, it was viewed more than 12 million times. However, the journalist in the story does not name either the total number of those killed, or separately the number of children or infants killed. Tzedek literally says the following: “I spoke with several soldiers, and they described what they witnessed as they passed through different houses in different communities. Headless children (as they said). Shot dead. Families shot to death, literally in their beds.” 

CNN reporter Nick Robertson described the incident in similar terms. video for the Instagram account of an American TV channel: “Bodies are everywhere. A huge number of killed members of this kibbutz. Men, women, children, with their hands tied, shot, tortured, with their heads cut off.” At the same time, the journalist noted that the number of victims is still unknown and is being counted. 

The number of 40 babies is mentioned in friend video of Tzedek posted by the official i24News X account at 3:19 p.m.: “About 40 babies were carried out on stretchers... Cribs overturned, strollers abandoned, doors wide open.” At 15:32, Tzedek herself retweeted the video, adding the following clarification: “The soldiers told me that they believe 40 babies/children were killed. The exact number of deaths is still unknown, as the military continues to go door to door and discover more and more Israeli casualties.” Note that these reports do not say that all 40 children were beheaded.

Later Tzedek gave interview Deputy commander of Unit 71 of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which found the bodies of the dead in Kfar Aza. David ben Zion, in a conversation with a journalist, spoke about the discovery of headless bodies, including children, in this kibbutz. In the evening of the same day this information confirmed to Business Insider, IDF spokesman Major Nir Dinar. Both military officials did not provide a death toll. About headless bodies stated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's press secretary Tal Heinrich, mentioned US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby spoke about the beheading in their speeches. They did not specify exactly how many Israelis were killed in this way.

On the same day, October 10, an unnamed IDF representative telephoned conversation responded to a request from the Turkish Anadolu news agency to comment on reports that Hamas militants were beheading children in border kibbutzim. The journalists' interlocutor said: "We saw this news, but we have no details or confirmation of this." The words of a representative of the Israeli army, who only said that he could not yet quickly confirm or deny the information, caused a flurry of accusations against the i24News TV channel and specifically Tzedek, which were then common in all media that wrote about the massacre of October 7–9 and referred to the report of an Israeli journalist. 

And although Tzedek did not talk about 40 beheaded babies, nor about 40 killed, “many of which were beheaded,” there was an overlap between her two broadcasts, and it was in this form that the information ended up in posts on social networks and in the headlines some Media. In particular, the American actor of Jewish origin, Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp wrote about the fact that “40 children were beheaded and burned in front of their parents.” fast on Instagram, posted on October 11, received more than a million likes. By calculations Mark Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, X's story received more than 44 million reactions (likes, shares and comments) in the first four days of distribution.

In publications of major Israeli and world media (Times of Israel, CNN, NBC and others, including those mentioned at the very beginning of this analysis) the wording about 40 beheaded babies did not appear - almost all referred to Tzedek reports and military statements, without mixing them into a single statement, and regularly issued updates on the topic. However, loud headlines, for example: “40 babies killed by Hamas. Children are beheaded..." hit on the covers of a number of British tabloids, and some publications clearly abused clickbait, publishing materials with headlines like “Up to 40 children found murdered, beheaded after Hamas massacre in Israeli kibbutz.” 

What data is available and how many children were beheaded by militants?

Already on October 11, IDF Speaker Major Libby Weiss reported CBS News that several Israeli soldiers who were the first to reach Kfar Azah reported finding "decapitated children of various ages, from infants to slightly older children," as well as adults whose bodies had been dismembered. The next day, the Israeli Ministry of Defense confirmed discovery of headless bodies in Kibbutz Beeri - it is located 36 km from Kfar Aza and was also attacked by militants. At that time, the corpses of more than 100 people were found in Beeri; how many of them were beheaded was not specified. IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus only noted that among them were infants. According to Conricus, a coroner from ZAKA (an Israeli public organization that brings together voluntary rescue groups), who worked at the site of the massacre in Kibbutz Be'eri, examined the bodies of the children and confirmed the facts of decapitation. “I admit that it took us some time to truly understand and verify this report, and it was difficult to believe that even Hamas could commit such a barbaric act,” an Israeli army spokesman said. October 15 discovery of at least one child's headless corpse witnessed IDF Colonel Golan Wah, then confirming this in conversation with France 24.

The most reliable data was presented publicly on October 16. Dr. Chen Kugel, head of the National Center for Forensic Medicine of Israel (Abu Kabir) in Tel Aviv, in response to a question from The Media Line's Aaron Poris saidthat the victims range in age from three months to 80 or 90 years old. He reported a large number of charred bodies; Some of the dead, he said, were burned alive. Some bodies, including children's, are headless. When asked whether they had been beheaded, Kugel answered in the affirmative, adding that, given the circumstances, it is difficult to determine whether the heads were separated from the bodies before or after death, and also how exactly this happened - “whether they were cut off with a knife or it was [the result of an RPG shell explosion]. As before wrote “Verified” in the analysis of publications about a beheaded Palestinian child, there are a number of reasons why the head can be separated from the body - from cutting off and exploding a shell to falling structures of a building or burning.

Kugel announced the results of the work of a group of 200 pathologists, which included specialists from the USA, Switzerland, New Zealand and other countries. Experts, in particular, confirm that many of those killed were tortured before death, and emphasize that some bodies are quite difficult to identify, since only fragments remain of them. 

The exact number of children killed during the Hamas attack and their ages are currently unknown - Israeli official services have not yet published a list of names, limiting themselves to reports of the total number of victims (at first it was said about 1,400 dead, then the figure was clarified - about 1200). Your own calculations leads the Haaretz newspaper, which confirmed the identities of 1,220 dead at the time of publication of this analysis. The publication compiled (and is updating) this list based on open sources, personal contacts and messages from relatives of the victims, as well as their posts on social networks, checking the information with data from nine Israeli departments involved in identifying the dead.

Thus, information about beheaded bodies (including children) discovered after the Hamas attack on Israel is confirmed both by reports of eyewitnesses and IDF representatives, and by data from an international group of pathologists. However, at the moment it is not reliably known exactly how many people of different ages were killed in this way - Israeli authorities, independent researchers and international organizations do not publish statistics. Moreover, the separation of the head from the body could also have occurred as a result of indirect physical impact - an investigation is required in each specific case. A number of bodies and their fragments have not yet been identified.

Cover photo: still frame from i24NEWS report