Ilia Yefimovich/picture-alliance/dpa/AP
Israeli forces recover bodies of residents of a destroyed house in the Kfar Aza community
Jerusalem CNN –
The Israeli government has not confirmed specific claims that Hamas attackers cut off the heads of babies in their shock attack on Saturday, an Israeli official told CNN, contradicting an earlier public statement from the prime minister’s office.
“There have been cases where Hamas fighters have carried out beheadings and other ISIS-style atrocities. However, we cannot confirm whether the victims were men or women, soldiers or civilians, adults or children,” the official said.
Explosive allegations that children were beheaded in the Kfar Aza kibbutz surfaced in Israeli media on Tuesday. The Israeli Defense Forces later described the scene as a “massacre” in a statement to CNN. Women, children, infants and the elderly were “brutally slaughtered as part of an ISIS operation,” the IDF said.
Tal Heinrich, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Wednesday that babies and toddlers had been found with “decapitated heads” in Kfar Aza.
US President Joe Biden appeared to confirm this information. In a roundtable discussion with Jewish community leaders on Wednesday, he said: “I’ve been doing this for a long time, I never really thought I would see … confirmed images of terrorists beheading children.”
A US government official later clarified Biden’s remarks, telling CNN that neither Biden nor his aides had seen images or received confirmed reports of Hamas beheading children or infants. The official clarified that Biden was referring to public comments from media and Israeli officials.
An IDF spokesman, Jonathan Conricus, said later in the day that terrorists had done this probably carried out Beheadings of babies in Kibbutz Be’eri.
“We received very, very disturbing reports from the ground that there were babies that had been beheaded… I think we can now say with relative certainty that unfortunately this happened in Be’eri,” he said.