'Beheaded Babies': When war propaganda is pushed by US president

Israeli babies beheaded by Hamas. 

This piece of information — among other tales of atrocities to come out of the Israel-Hamas war — went viral.  "At least 40 babies," said reporter Nicole Zedeck for Israel's i24News site, based on her interview with Israeli reserve soldier David Ben Zion. 

At warp speed, this was carried far and wide by the media across the world. The Israeli Prime Minister's spokesman also said that babies and toddlers "with their heads decapitated" had been found at the site. 

On 11 October, US President Joe Biden said, "I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children." 

But because some journalists did their bare minimum due diligence, the "Israel official says that the government cannot confirm" news surfaced. 

On 12 October, CNN reporter Sara Sidner took to X, formerly known as Twitter, and said "Yesterday the Israeli Prime Minister's office said that it had confirmed Hamas beheaded babies and children while we were live on the air. The Israeli government now says today it CANNOT confirm babies were beheaded. I needed to be more careful with my words and I am sorry."

But the damage had been done. This added to the fuel to substantiate Israel's "retaliation" against Hamas — which translated to the siege of Gaza, the bombing of Gaza and the evacuation order for Gazans to move south. Collective punishment for dehumanised and prosecuted people continues to unfold for the world to stand witness. 

And it is expected to reverberate across the world with more Islamophobia such as how Republican Presidential candidate Ron Desantis said while not all Gazans are Hamas, Palestinians should not be allowed into the US because they all are anti-semitic. Desantis also supported the population transfer of Palestinians from Gaza to Arab states.  

At least 2,750 Palestinians have been killed and 9,700 wounded in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip since 7 October, the enclave's health ministry said on Monday, reported Reuters. And this includes more than 1,030 Palestinian children - or about one child every 15 minutes - who have been killed in Israel's bombardment of Gaza since the war with Hamas erupted on 7 October, according to the civil society organisation Defense For Children.

Perhaps it is also noteworthy to know that David Ben Zion — an Israeli reserve soldier who first said Hamas beheaded babies — is a leader in Israel's West Bank settler movement. Earlier this year, he had called on armed settlers to wipe out the Palestinian village of Harawa, according to Rami G Khouri, a Distinguished Fellow at the American University of Beirut, author and journalist with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East.

To date, you can still find news headlines claiming Hamas beheaded 40 babies by The Times of India, NBC Montana, New York Post, and Fox News, among others. The news was not taken down after being refuted. 

It is also interesting to take stock of how disinformation has flooded social media from right-leaning accounts based not just out of the West, but other places stocked with their cheerleaders, such as India. 

The spread and use of disinformation in times of conflict is an effective tool to rally support for one party against the other. For mainstream media and the American president to also get on the disinformation bandwagon is perhaps telling of the widespread media bias dangers. 

Died or killed?

Media bias materialises in many forms. Some are more nuanced than the blatant use of disinformation and misinformation to promote an agenda. 

A key indicator, which insinuates bias, is the use of words when reporting deaths. It's "killed" when Israeli civilians — who were brutally murdered by the Palestinian militant group Hamas — are discussed. And that stands correct. Approximately 1,400 Israelis have been killed since 7 October. 

Under the same breadth, it's usually "died" when Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israel's bombings and siege of Gaza since 7 October. 

A side-by-side example is CNN's headline of Israel-Hamas live updates "Israel-Hamas war rages as Palestinian death toll rises in Gaza" coupled with an earlier headline from Al Jazeera "Israel-Hamas updates: 45 killed in Israel strike on Gaza apartment block." 

The tiny difference in the use of "kill" and "die" perpetuates media bias because kill denotes a person or thing responsible for the death. For instance, last year in May, The New York Times ran this headline: "Shireen Abu Akleh, Trailblazing Palestinian Journalist, Dies, Aged 51."

Akleh was targeted and killed by the Israeli military, according to Al Jazeera and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Akleh was also an American citizen. 

In October, "In the first eight days of fighting, at least 12 journalists were killed, two were missing, and eight injured," according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) website. 

There's also a breakdown of the deaths on the same website. "10 Palestinian journalists have been confirmed dead; one Israeli journalist has been confirmed killed, and one reported missing," according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). "On 13 October, a Beirut-based journalist was killed during a shelling attack in southern Lebanon that wounded six others."

Over 22 years, a special report by CPJ, says "CPJ has documented at least 20 journalist killings by members of the Israel Defense Forces. Despite numerous IDF probes, no one has ever been charged or held responsible for these deaths. The impunity in these cases has severely undermined the freedom of the press, leaving the rights of journalists in precarity."

Controlling the narrative

Away from ground zero, US news network MSNBC has suspended the shows of three Muslim anchors amid the Israeli war in Gaza. Two sources have confirmed that Mehdi Hasan, Ayman Mohieddine and Ali Velshi were "quietly taken out of the anchor's chair since Hamas' attack on Israel."

It is not only the use of words in reporting deaths but media bias foams at the mouth in several more instances. The narrative, for one. 

This is The New York Times verbatim: "No Way Out: Israel's leadership has repeatedly urged civilians in Gaza to flee the territory while they can. But the only viable exit is a border crossing into Egypt, which so far is keeping the door firmly shut" – in its report titled "As Deaths Soar in Gaza From Israeli Strikes, Egypt Offers Aid, but No Exit."

This, firstly, implies that the fault lies with the Gaza residents who are not paying heed to Israel's warning and just evacuate for their own safety. There is a fallacy to think or believe that "leaving" is a viable option for Gazans. Convoys carrying Gazans fleeing their homes for south Gaza have also been bombed by Israeli airstrikes and scores were killed. 

Secondly, the NYT story perpetuates that the fault lies with Egypt for not "opening its doors" to Gaza residents fleeing Israel's siege (and now invade) Gaza campaign. Egypt already hosts more than nine million refugees. 

The NYT is one of the most established news outlets in the West. But the bias is fervent even in local American outlets. Here's an example. 

Yesterday I came across a video clip of The Free Press, a new American media company, where the reporter covered a "pro-Palestine" rally at Columbia University — an Ivy League university in New York City. The coverage shows only Palestinian supporters. The reporter talks about hundreds of Palestinian supporters and "the day of Jihad" — something the reporter saw Hamas officials call for to rally support. 

The reporter, a Columbia Journalism School alum, also said, "I will say that at Columbia University only one group of people felt comfortable proclaiming their beliefs up and down the Broadway and they were the Palestine supporters."

Nina Berman, an American documentary photographer, filmmaker and author at Columbia University, posted on her Instagram photos of the said protest with a caption that reads: "Students in solidarity with Palestine and Israel held simultaneous demonstrations at Columbia University on 12 October. Newly installed Columbia president Minouche Shafik and other senior administrators have sent emails to students and faculty in recent days highlighting Israeli casualties but not mentioning Palestinian casualties or the 17-year Israeli siege against Gaza." 

While the media in the West remain awash with narratives and reporting as that of the two aforementioned stories, the fear of a mass exodus becomes more and more certain. A mass exodus of the Palestinian people is reminiscent of what happened in 1948, according to a Gaza City resident reported by Al Jazeera.

Heroes or freedom fighters?

Another key indicator is how the mass media covers war and conflict differently — meaning how different its tone and narrative are when invasions and wars break out across the world. 

Do you remember Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year and its media coverage? In the early weeks of the invasion, Ukrainians picking up rifles and making molotovs to fight the Russians were cheered and supported across the mainstream media. 

"You see these images of Ukrainians with guns being hailed as heroes. And for us what we constantly heard was, we are terrorists," said Mariam Barghouti, Palestinian writer and researcher, in an interview with AJplus in 2022, "for Palestinians, our resistance has been criminalised." 

Fast forward to this month, you cannot make comparisons between the volumes of Palestinian human stories coming out of Gaza and those of Ukrainians when Russia invaded. It's negligible at best, or fully absent, at worst in the mainstream media in the West.  

In an interview with Democracy Now, Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and the Programme of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, said "Thank you. Your reporting has been an oasis in a sea of war-mongering across mainstream media. For which I have deep contempt at this moment. They have mobilised almost every racial trope of savagery and barbarians. They have built on Islamophobia and the infrastructure of the war on terror to create a common sense, logical conclusion that war is inevitable. 

And whatever consequences come out is the fault of Hamas. Thereby further blaming the victims for their own killings and massacres." 

'Do you condemn Hamas?'  

Another key element in media bias which emerged since 7 October is condemnation. The intensity, volume and tone carried by the mainstream media in the West condemning Hamas' war crimes or calling for condemnation had been stupendous. Rightfully so, what Hamas committed deserves condemnation in the strongest language. 

If we are to hypothesise a neutral and fair mass media, are we correct to expect the same ferocity in condemnation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's order of Gaza's siege? To cut off electricity, food supply and the internet to a people numbering more than a million and confined in a strip — and then to bomb it — under the "retaliation" and "self-defence" banners surely demands condemnation. One would think. 

The same media that brought you news of Hamas condemnation miserably failed to do the same when Gaza was bombed following 7 October. 

However, there are scores of Jewish Americans and Jewish Israelis who have been rallying against Israel's military bombing and incursion of Gaza. There are also non-Jewish voices who are calling for an end to Gaza's siege by the Israeli government. 

But those voices do not find much space in the mainstream media, not nearly as much as the justification for Israel's retaliation against Hamas' terrorist attack on 7 October.  

At the same time, the same media asks Palestinians whether they condemn Hamas' attack.   

One instance happened when BBC Lewis Vaughan Jones pressed Palestine's de-facto Ambassador to the UK Husam Zomlot to condemn Hamas' Saturday attack on Israel.

"You just condemned Israel for killing civilians but you will not condemn Hamas for killing civilians," Jones said. 

In reply, Zomlot said, "How many times have you interviewed Israeli officials, Lewis? Hundreds of times. How many times has Israel condemned war crimes live in front of your own cameras? Do you start by asking them to condemn themselves? Have you? You don't. I'll answer that question: you don't."

As Zomlot pointed out, the Palestinians have to condemn a terrorist attack first in order to perhaps "qualify" their existence. This begets the inherent media bias against the Palestinians and its cause —  which is lacking in the most basic history lessons of the birth of Israel, Nakba 1948 and the Balfour Declaration 1917. 

How are we to even begin to understand the Israel-Palestine plight? Perhaps it is a volatile combination of things: lack of history lessons, the explosion of social media (a cesspool for propaganda, misinformation and disinformation), run-of-the-mill geopolitics and a biased Western media which brought all of us here. 

"There are rules even in war," reads a social media post by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres after Israel's Prime Minister publicly vowed to destroy Hamas. Israel's new war cabinet vowed the same. 

The "retaliation" against Hamas' war crimes will be of a larger scale, more aggressive and incur higher death tolls. In the end, "the rockets, bombing and collapsing buildings do not make distinctions between Hamas combatants and Palestinian civilians" wrote Bloomberg's columnist Bobby Ghosh. 

Ever since the Holocaust, criticism of the Israel government for their treatment of the Palestinian people has been relentlessly labelled as "anti-semitic" – so much so, that for decades on end, the Israeli government and its allies used the Holocaust to encroach, control and lay siege on Palestinian territories. Effectively, occupy it. For a persecuted people who experienced one of the most brutal genocides of the 20th century, how is it that they cannot recognise the Palestinian plight for freedom?

Perhaps that is too much to ask for. Perhaps, what is about to happen is a repetition of the 1948 Nakba, but this time, it will be televised — courtesy of the media.