[Blog] The forty beheaded babies hoax and others

At dawn on 7 October 2023, Hamas militants breached the most fortified barrier in the world and conducted massive attacks on a number of Israeli targets. They were accused of committing unspeakable atrocities.

One of the searing accusations was that they had beheaded 40 babies. This news was splashed on all major international news networks and further amplified with stories of other atrocities such as children burned in ovens and others killed and hung on clotheslines. Credence was given to these stories when Biden himself declared that he had seen pictures of decapitated babies, though the White House later walked away from this announcement.

Soon afterwards, some news channels began to cast doubt on the veracity of the information. NBC News, Sky News, New York Times, Le Monde.fr and a few others cautioned that the news was not verified and was therefore not reliable. Netanyahu and the Zionist media, on the other hand, continued to peddle the disinformation with the aim to demonize the Palestinians, painting them as savages and barbarians while presenting Israel as the bulwark of Western civilization against so-called Islamic barbarity. The continued repetition of this wild allegation has unfortunately ended up making people believe in this narrative as some sort of gospel truth (in fact, some time back I had a discussion with a friend, an intellectual who insisted that this story was true and could not have been cooked up).

However, according to Gemini, this tale of beheading babies is a big hoax. It all started on 10 October 2023 when an Israeli journalist, Nicole Zedeck, reported on i24 News Channel that Israeli soldiers had told her that they witnessed “40 babies, their heads cut off.” Netanyahu’s spokesperson did not lose time to scurry the claim to CNN, which reported the news as “confirmed.”

This is how the story of beheaded babies gained traction, though it was not corroborated by the IDF itself, and investigation at the purported site (Kfar Aza) did not reveal any evidence to support the beheading claim. In fact, the official death toll at Kfar Aza revealed that the youngest victim was 14 years old. According to Gemini, this false claim should be considered a classic “example of a hoax that spreads virally in the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the attacks.”

This is not dissimilar to another widely propagated hoax regarding the wild allegation that Saddam’s soldiers supposedly killed premature babies in Kuwait by taking them out of incubators. The story originated in October 1990 when a 15-year-old girl identified as Nayirah testified tearfully before the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus that, as a volunteer nurse, she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers remove babies from incubators and leave them to die. Later it was discovered that Nayirah was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States and had never served as a volunteer nurse.

In fact, the story was fabricated and formed part of a media campaign to mobilize support for the American invasion of Iraq.

Another example of toxic disinformation is the widespread accusation against Gaddafi to the effect that he had ordered his soldiers to use mass rape as a weapon of war and that Viagra was distributed to rape Libyan women in rebel areas. The claim was supported by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and was widely reported in the Western media. Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN, stated, in a meeting with UN officials, that “the Libyan military is using rape as a weapon in the war with the rebels.”

However, Amnesty International debunked the allegation as “disinformation by rebel forces” as it could not “find a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about someone being raped” (Wikipedia). Patrick Oliver Cockburn, a journalist of the Financial Times and The Independent, pointed out that “misleading reports on government forces were used to justify the NATO-led military intervention in Libya.” A June 2011 UN investigation found no evidence of mass rapes and dismissed the claims as “hysteria.”

One of the most famous, or infamous, examples of journalistic hoaxes is the case of Timisoara. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Communist regimes behind the Iron Curtain began to fall one by one like rotten apples. Widespread manifestations were rife in all these countries, including Romania, which was ruled by the despot Ceaușescu. On December 17, 1989, huge protests erupted in Timisoara following the eviction of a dissident Hungarian priest. This resulted in a violent crackdown by the police. On 22 December, western television networks, especially the French news outlets, beamed images from the Hungarian television showing several corpses lying on the ground, purporting that they were victims of the brutal police crackdown.

Later it was discovered that the bodies displayed on television were in fact of people who had died earlier and had been “disinterred” — in other words, they had been brought from a cemetery. According to Christian Delporte, French media historian, “the Timisoara hoax remains an example of journalists failing to check the accuracy of the news they broadcast.” Reporters Without Borders, on the other hand, condemned the Timisoara hoax as “une des plus grandes duperies de l'histoire journalistique moderne” (France 24).

Azize Bankur