On October 11, four days after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel, President Joe Biden addressed a group of Jewish community leaders in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” Biden said. “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.”
It was a jarring statement. And it was false.
Biden had seen no such pictures, nor received any such confirmation. He made those comments after Nicole Zedeck, a journalist for Israel’s i24 News, reported that 40 babies had been decapitated, citing Israeli soldiers at the scene of the attacks at Kfar Aza. A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently stated that babies and toddlers had been found with their “heads decapitated.”
Three hours later, Biden promoted the claim to the world and asserted he personally saw pictures of the horrifying scene, giving the story supreme legitimacy.
Hamas denied the allegation, and other Israeli journalists at the scene began reporting they had not seen evidence such beheadings had occurred nor had they been told it had happened by any of the Israeli soldiers they spoke with. Zedeck, the reporter from i24 News who was first to spread the allegation, later tweeted that “soldiers told me they believe 40 babies/children were killed. The exact death toll is still unknown as the military continues to go house to house and find more Israeli casualties.”
An anchor at the network defended the reporter and said that three separate Israel Defense Forces officials had told i24 News “that around 40 babies & small children were murdered in Kfar Aza, some burned, some beheaded.” CBS News and CNN also spread Israeli assertions that babies and toddlers had been decapitated.
Eventually, the Israeli government was forced to admit it had no evidence to support the claim, though it continued to imply that it might be true. A military spokesperson said that the IDF would not further investigate the beheading charges because it would be “disrespectful for the dead.”
White House officials then “clarified” what they claimed Biden was actually referring to. “U.S. officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently,” reported the Washington Post. “The president based his comments about the alleged atrocities on the claims from Netanyahu’s spokesman and media reports from Israel, according to the White House.” The purpose of such graphic descriptions, according to National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, was “to underscore the utter depravity and the barbaric nature with which these terrorists murdered and butchered innocent Israeli civilians.” Kirby, who dodged direct questions about whether Biden had personally seen any photos, added, “And that further underscores why — and this is what the President’s specific point was yesterday — that we got to stay with Israel. We’ve got to continue to make sure they have the support that they need.”
Biden has never publicly retracted the incendiary claims. And the Washington Post reported that the president had been urged by staffers not to make that allegation in his speech on October 11, “because those reports were unverified.”
Despite the Israeli government’s comments, warnings about the veracity of the claims from his own advisers, and the extensively documented lists of people killed on October 7 during the Hamas raids, Biden has inexplicably and repeatedly doubled down on the claim that he saw pictures of decapitated babies.
At a November 16 press conference in Woodside, California, after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden first promoted another debunked charge, that Hamas had what amounted to its own version of a Pentagon under Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. “Here’s the situation: You have a circumstance where the first war crime is being committed by Hamas by having their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital. And that’s a fact. That’s what’s happened,” Biden said. He then declared, “Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again like they did before, to where they were cutting babies’ heads off to burn — burning women and children alive.”
The allegation that Hamas beheaded babies continues to spread across the internet and social media. In a post on Israel’s official X account, readers were invited to “Listen to the eyewitness accounts of the 8 burned babies and one beheaded baby which were butchered by Hamas terrorists on October 7th.” It featured a video of Israeli Col. Golan Vach purporting to describe what he witnessed. On November 26, an Israeli journalist posted an interview with an IDF soldier who claimed that babies had been hung from clotheslines. The reporter later apologized to his readers and said the story was false. “Why would an army officer invent such a horrifying story?” he wrote. “I was wrong.”
There is evidence to suggest that Biden, in addition to absorbing the most sensational claims made in Israeli media in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, was fed other unverified claims directly from Netanyahu, his close friend of many decades. Israel released a video of phone call between Netanyahu and Biden on October 11, the first time Biden publicly made the beheading claim. “We were struck Saturday by an attack whose savagery I can say we have not seen since the Holocaust,” Netanyahu told Biden. “Since we last spoke, the extent of this evil, it’s only gotten worse. They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them, and executed them.” He added, “They’re even worse than ISIS and we need to treat them as such.” Significantly, Netanyahu does not appear to have alleged that Hamas beheaded babies, though he did claim that soldiers were decapitated. In an appearance with Biden on October 18 in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu made no mention of babies being beheaded. “They beheaded soldiers,” he said. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was shown extensive graphic images of the aftermath of the attacks during a visit to Israel, also did not mention any beheaded babies.
There is no doubt that widespread atrocities and war crimes were committed during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 and that children were killed. Yet in many narratives, the burned or beheaded babies story still forms one of the most harrowing details of the October 7 massacres. According to major Israeli media outlets that have worked diligently to identify all of the victims of the October 7 attacks, there was one infant killed that day: a 9-month-old named Mila Cohen who was shot dead at Kibbutz Be’eri as her mother held her in her arms. Cohen’s mom, who was shot in the arm, survived.
None of these facts have altered Biden’s commitment to making the debunked beheading claim a key detail in his impassioned defense of the legitimacy of Israel’s mass killing campaign, during which more than 18,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 7,000 children. On December 12, at a reelection campaign event at the Salamander hotel in Washington, D.C., Biden said, “I saw some of the photographs when I was there — tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman — totally, completely inhuman.”
Biden is the president of the most powerful nation on Earth, not a random poster on social media. He supposedly has access to the best intelligence in the world. If he actually has evidence to support this beheading claim — apparently evidence that his closest advisers have not seen — then he should produce it.
This allegation is one of the most gut-wrenching and horrifying charges to be made about the events of October 7. It is not some insignificant detail that can be explained away by Biden’s age or his tendency to exaggerate or stumble into gaffes. It was a detail that fueled the rage and quest for revenge, and was cited when Biden declared that Israel is fighting subhumans in Gaza. “They’re animals. They’re animals,” Biden said on December 12 when he repeated the beheading claims. “They exceeded anything that any other terrorist group has done of late that I — in memory.”
The verified facts, as we currently understand them, are horrifying enough. So why does Biden feel the need to bolster his defense of Israel’s indiscriminate war against Gaza by spreading debunked allegations? The latest estimations of the death toll on October 7 are as follows: Israel has officially identified approximately 1,200 Israelis or Israeli residents killed. Of these, 274 were soldiers, 764 were civilians, 57 were Israeli police, and 38 were local security guards. Among the civilians killed, in addition to 9-month-old Mila Cohen, 12 of them were between the ages of 1 and 9 years, and 36 were between the ages of 10 and 19. There are reportedly still bodies that have not been officially identified.
It also must be noted that multiple Israeli media outlets have reported on “friendly fire” incidents in which Israeli military forces responding to the attacks killed Israeli citizens, though there has been no definitive calculation of the number of such deaths and may never be one.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has done extensive work trying to confirm the actual events of October 7 and published an important story debunking some of the most shocking false claims made in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks. Biden should read it.
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