40 Beheaded Children

The initial reports of what happened during the Al Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023 shocked the collective conscience: Concertgoers abducted and killed, women raped and brutalized, entire families murdered. And perhaps most horrifying of all: 40 babies beheaded at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, an incident initially reported by an Israeli TV news channel based on an interview with an IDF soldier. What kind of monster would behead a baby? As more details of that day emerged, and the claims by Israeli officials remained unsubstantiated, the answer became clearer. Not the Hamas fighters who took part in the terrible attack that day.

Beheaded Israeli Children

While it seems that as many as 38 children were indefensibly slaughtered during the siege—at least one, 12-year-old Leil Hetzroni, by Israeli tank fire, according to witnesses—evidence now indicates that none of them was beheaded. In the days that followed Al Aqsa Flood, dozens of news outlets around the world picked up the story, which was then repeated by Israeli officials, including Benjamin Netanyahu. President Biden even said he had seen photos of these children, a claim that was quickly walked back by his staff and that he later corrected. Because those photos don't exist.

Perhaps he was confused. Perhaps, as an avowed Zionist, he truly believed he'd seen such imaginary photos. More likely he was trying to bolster public opinion in what would prove to be, once the ensuing genocide began in earnest, the cruelest way possible. In exchange for real children's lives. (It ultimately didn't work. 61% of Americans now support an arms embargo on Israel according to a recent CBS poll.)

Over a year later, no parent has come forward to say their child was beheaded. There is no list of names of these supposedly decapitated children, no memorial, no published photos. Like the claims of rape (we'll get to this one in a later post, in case the dimwitted D-list celeb biographer is reading), of command centers under hospitals, of breasts being cut off of women and tossed around like hacky sacks (this last claim so absurd it infuriated even Chris Hayes as a breathless Israeli press agent tried to sell it on his show), it's a lie. A lie that, like the others, helped gin up support for a genocide. Israeli authorities continue to neither officially confirm nor deny the allegations that a single Israeli child was beheaded on October 7th.

Beheaded Palestinian Children

There have, in fact, been children beheaded during the 14 months since the Al Aqsa Flood took place. Many of them. Beheaded, pulverized, eviscerated, left armless and legless, starved, burned alive, maimed. But they aren't Israeli children. They are Palestinian. The UN has estimated that over 17,000 Palestinian children to date have been killed by Israel during this latest conflict, one child every thirty minutes. And many experts believe that total is a vast undercounting. The true number is more likely between 65,000 and 200,000. But even that first figure is staggering. No other conflict has killed more children more brutally in one year, according to the UN.

Most of the victims were aged 5 to 9. It is theorized that this cohort represents those too big to be carried by their parents and too small to run quickly enough to avoid being shot or bombed. To be clear, these children aren't collateral damage. They are being deliberately shot, bombed and starved, according to over 65 medical professionals who have witnessed their injuries. Just listen to what this one doctor has to say about what he saw. Or this one.

Bearing Witness

As an experiment, I decided to look for images of 40 beheaded Palestinian children using search engines and social media accounts. Though thousands of such files no doubt exist as evidence of the first genocide recorded in real time, it's not always easy to find them. They are often wiped from the internet the same way that Stalin had his enemies scissored from photos during his reign of terror. For example, it's actually surprisingly difficult to hunt down the most famous image of a beheaded Palestinian baby, one-year-old Ahmad Al-Najar being held aloft, flames in the background, nothing visible above his neck, after an Israeli missile strike on a refugee camp in Rafah last June.

But I did end up finding a fair number of them. Not all of the images were technically of beheaded children. Some of the victims were scalped, others were missing the backs of their skulls, cracked like egg shells, along with the brains those skulls once held. Some had only chunks of their heads, their jaws, their faces blasted away. All were dead.

I counted any head not attached to at least half of its corresponding body to be a valid choice for inclusion. Did the stump of a neck being gnawed on by a dog belong to a teenager or a young adult? I decided it was the former. His chest was narrow and hairless. Had the boy who had been bulldozed been decapitated? Again, not completely clear from what remained of him in the grapple bucket. ("Everything just squishes out," an IDF soldier told CNN earlier this year, as he described mowing down civilians.) I left him out. The girl hanging upside down from a blown-up building still had her dust-covered hair attached to her skull, but no longer the contents of her skull, it seemed. I counted her, since "debrained" is really just another way of saying "beheaded."

So Much Evidence

I did not include images of shopping bags filled with flesh, though I suppose the scraps of brain matter contained in them no longer belonged to a body, whether a child or an adult. Rescuers scooped up those remains and put them in bags labeled according to weight. Last August, a man named Hassan was looking for his 6-year-old child Ali, who had gone to the mosque to pray before being blown to bits. He was given a bag of flesh weighing 18 kg., what the rescuers estimated to be the weight of a child that age.

I saw a face no longer attached to a skull, but it seemed to be an adult's. I saw several fetuses blasted from their mothers' wombs, one of them charred and blackened. I didn't include these, either. And so many other dead children who still had their heads, some of them with bullets lodged inside of them, bullets fired by Israeli soldiers deliberately trying to kill them. I watched a video of a child being shot by a sniper, people rushing to rescue him and then a bomb being dropped on his rescuers.

An 8-year-old girl named Noor wrote her name on the inside of her arm and underneath it the words "the love of Mommy and Daddy" so she could be identified, given a name, understood to belong to someone. Even if her head were blown off, she wanted us to know who she was and that she mattered. She was killed by a bomb blast.

None of these children were human shields. Whatever that empty phrase actually now means. (I'm trying to think of how that would work here. A school shooter has holed up in a classroom with 20 children. Local police: "No worries. We're sending an F-16 with a 2,000-pound bunker-busting bomb to take out everything within a three-block radius, including homes, other schools, hospitals." 911 caller: "Roger that.")

Putting It Together

Here are some of the Palestinian children who were beheaded that I found during my search. Warning: The images are extremely graphic. Do not click on the link unless you are prepared to be sickened.

And here is a collage of all the corresponding beheaded Israeli children.

The two collages stand in defiance of what our government and our media and Zionist influencers support. They want you to believe the lie that 40 Israeli children were beheaded by terrorists so evil they deserve to be eradicated whatever the cost to innocent life while denying the truth that hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian children were the ones actually murdered—not accidentally killed—in this barbarous way.

Rationalize it in any way you want. Call them dolls, as the most inhumane of the Holocaust-denying Zionists claim they are. (Surely, that must be the most evil lie of them all.) Try to ignore it, erase it, deny it, both-sides it, but-what-about it, "war is hard" equivocate it. The truth is right here in every shattered body, in every blown-open skull. To those who say otherwise, I say their blood, their brains, their viscera are on your complicit hands.

This post is dedicated, as always, to the children of Gaza.