Two senior administration officials reportedly backtracked on President Joe Biden’s Wednesday claim that he viewed “pictures of terrorists beheading children.”
While speaking to Jewish community leaders, Joe Biden said he “never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.”
That claim appears to be false. “Two senior administration officials said Biden was referring to reports from Israel about beheaded children and cited several media reports of beheadings,” NBC News reported.
Before Joe Biden’s speech, reports surfaced that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not confirm that babies were specifically beheaded. IDF Spokesperson Maj. Doron Spielman told NBC News on Wednesday the “specific report and that number I can’t confirm.”
However, reports surfaced on Tuesday that Israeli soldiers discovered dead babies after the Palestinian Hamas invasion of the nation that began Saturday. i24news correspondent Nicole Zedeck said, “Babies, their heads cut off. That’s what they said. Gunned down families — completely gunned down in their beds.”
KFAR AZA, ISRAEL – OCTOBER 10, 2023: A view of a house left in ruins after an attack by Hamas militants on this kibbutz days earlier when dozens of civilians were killed near the border with Gaza, on October 10, 2023 in Kfar Aza, Israel. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty)
Israeli Major General Itai Veruv confirmed the brutal attack, according to CNN via Mediaite:
What I saw, hundreds of terrorists in full armor, full gear, with all the equipment and all the ability make a massacre. Go from apartment to apartment, from room to room and kill babies, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms… They locked themselves in the protection rooms of their houses and people were out with their children and they killed them. They killed babies in front of their parents, and then killed the parents. They killed parents and we found babies between the dogs and the family killed before him. They cut heads of the people.
Veruv also confirmed the report of murdered babies to the Jerusalem Post. “You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms, and how the terrorist kills them. It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre, it’s a terror activity,” he said.
“It is something that I never saw in my life. It’s something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places. It’s not something that happens in new history,” he added.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
