It’s amazing the degree to which this story which only became news on Tuesday has become central to news about the Israel-Hamas war. As I pointed out yesterday, the IDF confirmed the story of some babies/children being beheaded and CBS reported on another named source outside the IDF who also claimed to have seen the proof.

By the end of the day yesterday, even President Joe Biden even referenced the claim in his remarks, though as I said at the time his statement wasn’t very clear. Shortly after Biden’s comments, officials in the administration clarified that he had no inside information and was merely referring to published reports.

Earlier today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed images of dead babies to Sec. of State Anthony Blinken and that led to a report from the Jerusalem Post saying the story had been confirmed.

The Jerusalem Post can now confirm based on verified photos of the bodies that the reports of babies being burnt and decapitated in Hamas’s assault on Kfar Aza are correct. May their memory be a blessing.

The photos were shown to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his visit to Israel on Thursday by the Public Diplomacy Directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office. Later in the day, the photos were published by the Prime Minister’s Office on Twitter. The photos are graphic and have a content warning covering them until a button reading “show” is pressed.

All of this is becoming a bit confused with claims and counter-claims online that sometimes don’t seem to connect to what anyone has actually said. The initial report from i24 News reporter Nicole Zedek was that the bodies of 40 babies had been taken out on gurneys from the kibbutz. She said she’d heard that from soldiers who arrived first at the scene. Other reporters at the scene heard the same thing but none of them actually saw the bodies. Zedek posted a video of one of the commanders at the scene who said of Hamas, “they cut heads of children, cut heads off women.”

"They chopped heads of children and women," says David Ben Zion, Deputy Commandee of Unit 71 to our @Nicole_Zedek, while reporting from the massacre in Kfar Aza in southern Israel pic.twitter.com/IHSB0ywMbF

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) October 10, 2023

Somehow the social media telephone game turned this into the claim that 40 babies had been beheaded which no one had ever said was the case. In any case, after the Prime Minister showed the photos and released them, CNN spoke to a spokesman for the Israeli government who said reports of beheaded children couldn’t be confirmed (though they maintained Hamas had beheaded some people).

The Israeli government has not confirmed the specific claim that Hamas attackers cut off the heads of babies during their shock attack on Saturday, an Israeli official told CNN, contradicting a previous public statement by the Prime Minister’s office.

“There have been cases of Hamas militants carrying out beheadings and other ISIS-style atrocities. However, we cannot confirm if the victims were men or women, soldiers or civilians, adults or children,” the official said…

CNN has pored through hundreds of hours of media posted online attempting to corroborate accounts of atrocities committed by Hamas. In one video, which CNN determined to be authentic but has not been able to geolocate, an assailant attacks an injured man with a garden tool in an attempt to behead him. But CNN has not seen anything that would appear to confirm the claims of decapitated children.

CNN also visited the ransacked ruins of Kfar Aza on Tuesday and saw no evidence of beheaded youths. Israeli officials have not released any photographs of the incident either.

As for the photos released by the Prime Minister, they do show murdered children two of whom burned to death. I’m not posting them here but you can find them on X. There have been multiple reports saying that Hamas terrorists lit people’s homes on fire to force them to turn out where they would be shot.

Deborah Mintz told Sky News how fighters had attempted to break into a concrete-reinforced shelter where she had taken cover with her daughter, son-in-law and their 10-day-old baby…

While the reinforced room had steel doors to shield against rocket attacks, it wasn’t equipped with locks – prompting an hours-long battle…

“When Hamas saw my daughter and her husband were stronger than they were, they set fire to the house and tried to smoke us out.”

So burned Israeli children almost certainly are children murdered by Hamas who set their homes on fire. The third image released today shows a dead infant covered in blood. You can’t tell from the image if the baby was shot or killed in some other way. CNN doesn’t really address it at all.

All of this is horrible but, again, this really has become one of the central arguments about the whole attack on Israel, at least online. If it’s true that Israel can’t confirm the specific claims about beheadings at Kfar Aza then it’s best to get the truth out. But this may not be the last word.

The network that first reported this still isn’t backing away from it. They interviewed Yossi Landau, the southern region head of operations for ZAKA, which is a civilian emergency response group who help collect the remains of the dead after terror attacks. Yossi was cited by CBS News as someone who was an eyewitness to some of this. This interview is just audio but what he describes seeing in these homes is extremely gruesome.