Horror images. And perhaps the beginning of a confirmation. It was in a post published on the social network Aza by Hamas fighters.
In these images, a baby, with a blurred face, a bloody body lying in a body bag, as well as a charred black mass. For its part, the Jerusalem Post claimed this Thursday, also on its X account, to have been able to authenticate the images of “burned and decapitated” newborns.
Four days after Hamas fighters entered Kibbutz Beeri and Kfar Aza, massacring entire families in their path, these new assertions suggest that terrible abuses against babies were indeed committed by Islamist fighters.
While images of devastated kibbutzim circulate widely on social networks, United States President Joe Biden sowed doubt for the first time, on October 10, by claiming to have seen authenticated images of decapitated babies. “I never thought I would see authenticated photos of terrorists beheading children,” he said, visibly upset, during a speech after a meeting with representatives of the Jewish community in the United States.
But his comments, in which many had seen confirmation of the rumors, were quickly corrected by a White House spokesperson. If the latest report from Israeli emergency services shows hundreds of residents killed, there has been no reliable source so far to confirm that such crimes were committed in the kibbutz of Kfar Aza.
In an interview given to the Washington Post, the spokesperson clarified that the American president has in fact neither seen the photos of such beheadings nor had confirmation that they were committed by Palestinian Hamas fighters. Joe Biden made these words after speaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and based on information relayed by the Israeli media.
During a telephone interview, excerpts of which were broadcast on X, Benjamin Netanyahu declared to Joe Biden: “We have never seen such savagery in the history of our state. Not since the Holocaust. Mr. President, Joe, they took dozens of babies, they tied them up, they burned them, they executed them. They beheaded soldiers, they massacred these young people who had come to a festival in nature.
Initially, the rumor quickly spread online, carried by a report from the Israeli channel i24 News, itself relayed by the official X account of the State of Israel. In these images, we see the channel’s journalist, in shock, describing the events. The reporter thus mentions in a jerky narration “the horrors [that she hears in the story] of these soldiers […] around 40 babies at least were buried.” “No one [among the soldiers who entered Kfar Aza after its recapture by the Israeli army] could expect [a morbid spectacle like] this,” she also specifies in another video published on the website of chain.
On Tuesday, after a visit organized for the press under the protection of the Israeli army, the first information denying the fact that 40 babies had been murdered, and some beheaded, began to circulate on X, from foreign journalists. For its part, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared on Wednesday that it was not able “at this stage” to confirm the number of “40 murdered babies”.
Nearly a week after the mass offensive led by Hamas in Israel, American Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets this Thursday with Benjamin Netanyahu, before a meeting scheduled for Friday in Amman with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and King Abdullah II of Jordan. The conflict has left more than 1,200 dead on the Israeli side since Saturday, and 1,417 on the Palestinian side according to a latest report published Thursday.