The Forty Beheaded Babies Hoax and Others

At dawn on October 7, 2023, Hamas militants breached one of the most fortified barriers in the world and launched extensive attacks on various Israeli targets, leading to accusations of horrific atrocities.

One of the most shocking allegations was that they beheaded 40 babies. This story spread rapidly across major international news outlets, further fueled by reports of other atrocities, including children being burned in ovens and others killed and hung on clotheslines. This narrative gained traction when President Biden claimed he had seen images of decapitated babies, although the White House later distanced itself from this assertion.

However, skepticism began to surface as news organizations such as NBC News, Sky News, The New York Times, and Le Monde.fr warned that these reports were not verified and thus unreliable. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and pro-Zionist media persisted in promoting this disinformation to demonize Palestinians, portraying them as savages and presenting Israel as the defender of Western civilization against alleged Islamic barbarism. This repeated claim has unfortunately led many to accept it as truth, even among educated individuals.

According to Gemini, the story of beheaded babies is a significant hoax. It originated on October 10, 2023, when Israeli journalist Nicole Zedeck reported on i24 News Channel that Israeli soldiers claimed they had witnessed "40 babies, their heads cut off." Netanyahu’s spokesperson quickly relayed this claim to CNN, which reported it as "confirmed."

The narrative of beheaded babies gained momentum despite the IDF's lack of corroboration, and investigations at the supposed site (Kfar Aza) found no evidence supporting the claims. The official death toll indicated that the youngest victim was 14 years old. Gemini categorized this falsehood as a classic example of viral disinformation emerging in the chaotic aftermath of the attacks.

This situation is reminiscent of another notorious hoax concerning the unfounded allegation that Saddam’s soldiers had killed premature babies in Kuwait by removing them from incubators. This tale, which emerged in October 1990, was based on the emotionally charged testimony of a 15-year-old girl named Nayirah before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus, claiming she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers committing these atrocities. However, it was later revealed that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. and had never served as a nurse.

The fabricated story was part of a media campaign designed to rally support for the American invasion of Iraq.

Another example of harmful disinformation involves the widespread claims against Gaddafi, alleging that he ordered his soldiers to use mass rape as a weapon of war and that Viagra was distributed to facilitate the rape of Libyan women in rebel areas. This narrative was supported by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and extensively covered in Western media. Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, claimed in a meeting with UN officials that "the Libyan military is using rape as a weapon in their conflict with rebels."

However, Amnesty International debunked the allegations as "disinformation by rebel forces," stating it could not find any victims of rape or doctors knowledgeable of such cases. Journalist Patrick Oliver Cockburn noted that misleading reports about government forces were used to justify NATO-led military intervention in Libya. A June 2011 UN investigation found no evidence of mass rapes, dismissing the claims as "hysteria."

One of the most infamous journalistic hoaxes occurred in Timisoara. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Communist regimes in Eastern Europe began to collapse. In Romania, massive protests erupted on December 17, 1989, against the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, leading to a violent police crackdown. On December 22, Western television networks, particularly French news outlets, aired footage from Hungarian television showing corpses on the ground, claiming they were victims of police brutality.

It was later revealed that the bodies shown had been exhumed from cemeteries. Media historian Christian Delporte stated that the Timisoara hoax exemplifies journalists' failure to verify the accuracy of their reports. Reporters Without Borders condemned it as "one of the greatest deceptions in modern journalistic history."