- 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.”
Hyperbolic claims are sometimes lies used to justify a particularly enthusiastic military response. This was done by Kuwait after the invasion in 1990. Kuwaiti officials testified that Iraqi military forces were killing babies in incubators in hospitals. These reports were false but they were promoted by the Bush administration as a moral justification for Desert Storm.
On the other hand, sometimes hyperbolic claims are dismissed, as were many reports about the Holocaust.
My estimate right now is that there will be approximately 1000 Israelis killed, between 10k and 20k Palestinians killed, and that most of the killed will be civilians. I also think this will effectively end Hamas as an organization and may permanently change Gaza for the worse.