- Israel soldiers say they found dead babies at a kibbutz near the Israel-Gaza border.
- The IDF told Insider that some had been decapitated.
- The kibbutz was attacked by Hamas on Saturday, and there was fighting there into Sunday.
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces told Insider on Tuesday that its soldiers found the decapitated corpses of babies at Kfar Aza, a kibbutz near Gaza.
The spokesperson, Major Nir Dinar, did not say how many babies’ bodies had been found, nor how many had been beheaded.
There hasn’t been independent confirmation of what was found, though other Israeli media have reported the same claim and attributed it to soldiers.
The spokesperson told Insider: “These people are animals. They have butchered women and children in worse ways than ISIS.”
Reports started to emerge on Tuesday that Israeli soldiers had made the grisly discoveries at the self-sustaining rural community near Gaza.
The kibbutz was attacked by Hamas militants on Saturday, with fighting continuing there into Sunday.
Nicole Zedek, reporting for the Israeli news station, i24News, said: “Babies, their heads cut off, that’s what they [the soldiers] said.”
So it’s ok for the news to be wrong if it’s only sometimes?
As with most things, the issue isn’t binary. Factual errors are unavoidable to some degree. What is more important is how errors are dealt with (eg, are there retractions, and how visible are they), and how they interact with any editorial bias.
There is a pretty big difference between rigorous but occasionally wrong reporting, careless reporting, and intentionally biased or misleading reporting.
Those are all great points. I’m concerned about how this specific sources (I24) stats hold up against my go-to news sources, AP, DW and Reuters on mediabiasfactcheck.com (which might have it’s own biases, but that’s a whole discussion for another day). I think the best tool we have to combat misinformation is time. War moves quickly, and so does reporting, but that leads to sloppiness. There are also bad faith actors pushing stories to get one side riled up. The longer we wait to jump to conclusions, the better information we have at our disposal. I am thinking about a specific example today about the girl whose body was reported to be paraded around naked; earlier today a story just got posted on here that she’s alive according to her mother. We will only know for sure when a neutral and reputable party verifies this in the near future.
I really want this whole Lemmy thing to work out in the long run and I want to avoid the mistakes made on Reddit that led to witch hunts and misinformation being spread. If everyone could take one thing away from this, it’s to double check multiple sources, be skeptical about who has an agenda to push, and wait for all the information to come out.