The current Israeli death toll is now 1,200 and an IDF spokesman made clear the total is not climbing because of ongoing fighting. On the contrary the numbers went from 700 to 900 and now to 1,200 as recovery crews have been able to go through places near the Gaza security fence which were hard hit in the initial attack. Simply put, they are finding hundreds more bodies of people who were killed over the weekend.

One of the worst massacres took place at Kibbutz Kfar Aza. When an IDF Major General saw what had happened there, he decided to call in the foreign media as witnesses, fearing that unless people saw what had happened no one would believe it.

He had arrived at Kfar Aza on Saturday to join the fighting. Now he said he had gathered the media to impress upon them the scale of the slaughter. “When I discovered what had happened here, I remembered how General Eisenhower, when the American army liberated concentration camps in Germany, immediately brought the media so the world would know.”

And as it turns out, a story emanating from Kfar Aza has become the most contested claim in the war so far. When I wrote about this yesterday, there were reports that as many as 40 babies/children had been killed in addition to an unknown number of adults. Authorities refused to say how many people had died in total but the death toll at a nearby kibbutz (Kibbutz Be’eri) passed 100 yesterday. The total population of kibbutz Kfar Aza was around 750 so a death of 100 people including 40 children was certainly possible.

But it was one additional detail which really caught people’s attention worldwide. Some of those 40 children and some of the adults had been beheaded by their attackers. Online there was quickly a game of telephone which resulted in some people claiming that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies while others denied there was any proof for this story at all. I saw people arguing back and forth about this all day long. One guy described the story as an example of “atrocity propaganda” designed to emotionally manipulate people into support for war.

To be clear, I think the atrocities we know Hamas committed over the weekend are more than enough. There are 1,200 people dead, most of them unarmed civilians. Whatever Israel does to eradicate Hamas, they surely have it coming. That said, I do want to know the truth about this story, especially since it is now one of the most widely spread stories about the conflict. What did happen at Kfar Aza?

Today there are several new reports. CNN says it also heard reports of women and children “butchered” but couldn’t independently confirm those claims.

In Kfar Aza, the Israel Defense Forces was going house to house, collecting the dead in body bags and loading them onto a truck. The IDF told CNN that women, children, toddlers and elderly were “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action.”..

The IDF told CNN the killings at Kfar Aza amounted to a “massacre,” but said it could not confirm the number of people killed there and would not go into details how they died. CNN could not independently verify the IDF’s accounts of children being killed in the attack.

The London Times heard the same reports and even put those claims in the headline.

All day, military chaplains and search teams tenderly wrapped tiny bodies, carrying them to waiting stretchers that bore them away from the nightmare of Kfar Aza…

Every few minutes soldiers broke the silence to announce that more dead people had been discovered. Some said that up to 40 babies’ corpses had been found among entire families who were shot dead as they slept. The children in particular appeared to have suffered gruesome deaths: there were claims that some had had their throats cut.

“I’ve served as a combat soldier and officer for 39 years,” Major General Itai Veruv said as he stood with red-rimmed eyes at the entrance to the kibbutz. “I’ve never seen anything that comes close to this. It’s not even something that our parents knew. This is something out of the world of our grandfathers back in Europe, from the pogroms and the Holocaust.”

CBS News also has a report which identifies specific individuals who told reporters what they saw. In a video report, CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell noted these claims stemmed not only from named sources within the IDF (Maj. Libby Weiss) but also from named sources at the separate organization which recovers bodies (Yossi Landau).

Israeli emergency responders with years of experience doing the grim work of recovering bodies broke down in tears Wednesday as they told CBS News what they’d witnessed in the aftermath of Hamas’ brutal terror attack on Israel. The depth of the horror unleashed by Hamas Saturday on Israeli communities near the border with the Gaza Strip was still emerging five days later.

After finally wresting back control of the small farming community of the Kfar Aza kibbutz, Israeli security forces discovered the aftermath of what a military spokesperson said could only be described as “a massacre.”…

“We see blood spread out in homes. We’ve found bodies of people who have been butchered,” said Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Maj. Libby Weiss. “The depravity of it is haunting.”

Weiss told CBS News that more than one of the Israeli soldiers who first reached Kfar Aza reported finding “beheaded children of varying ages, ranging from babies to slightly older children,” along with adults who had also been dismembered.

Yossi Landau, the head of operations for the southern region of Zaka, Israel’s volunteer civilian emergency response organization, told CBS News he saw with his own eyes children and babies who had been beheaded.

Insider has a report in which it pushed for more information on who was beheaded in the attack and the military contact simply refused saying the IDF would not go into more detail.

The spokesperson, Major Nir Dinar, was responding to widespread criticism that the IDF had spread a sickening claim about its enemies without demonstrating that it was true.

On Tuesday, Dinar told Insider that babies’ bodies had been found at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, and that some had been decapitated…

On Wednesday, Insider approached Dinar again to ask if the claim would be fully investigated to provide details of the numbers and their manner of death.

He responded by saying: “We’re not going to investigate the condition of bodies and even if we did we won’t comment publicly about the condition of our civilians’ bodies. And babies.”…

He said the claim of decapitated babies was made based on what soldiers on the ground had relayed to him and others in the military.

This strikes me as a mistake. Granted the military does want to be respectful of the dead but this story has blown up so quickly and is getting so much push back that it’s important to get to the truth of it. That was the reason reporters were brought to Kfar Aza in the first place, i.e. so they could be witnesses. So let them be witnesses. Better to get the facts out now than to refuse to confirm any details. By doing that you are only giving credence to those who say the stories coming out of Kfar Aza can’t be trusted.

Here’s a version of the CBS News report on Kfar Aza minus Norah O’Donnell.

If a story is going to be used in questions like this (below) it should be confirmed. Still, Rep. Tlaib ought to be able to offer some statement of sympathy for Israelis killed over the weekend.

🚨WATCH: I asked Rep. Rashida Tlaib about Hamas terrorists chopping off babies heads, children being burned alive, and women being raped – she had nothing to say. pic.twitter.com/a3UvuvJ4hW

— Hillary Vaughn (@hillary__vaughn) October 11, 2023

Update: Joe Biden brought this topic up this afternoon. The way he says this is not very clear, unfortunately.

WAR: President Biden confirms that Hamas has beheaded dozens of Jewish babies. There is no chance that Gaza will survive. It is time for ALL residents who aren't complicit to evacuate to Egypt. Do not remain. pic.twitter.com/hbcj4MkUpp

— @amuse (@amuse) October 11, 2023

“I never really thought that I would see—have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” he said. Did he see those pictures. It sounds like he started to say that and then corrected himself. Maybe he didn’t see but only had it confirmed. Was it confirmed privately in some briefing or is he relying on the same open source info the rest of us can see. Again, it’s not clear so I don’t think this settles the issue. God knows I don’t want to see any such photos if they exist but I think we do need someone to confirm this information once and for all.