The English-language media has spent a lot of time debating whether Israeli babies were beheaded. An Israeli newscaster had reported that a soldier found decapitated children at the scene of an attack on Kfar Aza by the Palestinian group Hamas. The story made it to front pages around the world. Other journalists began to scrutinize the claim and heard different accounts from different officials in the Israeli government. U.S. President Joe Biden implied that he had seen photos of the beheadings, then the White House backtracked.
All this debate around beheadings seemed to miss a more fundamental point: that children were killed. The existence of a massacre should be enough to shock and horrify. Hamas killed or took hostage hundreds of Israelis. (Clearly frustrated with media skepticism, the Israeli government posted pictures of burned Israeli children to social media.) The Israeli military has killed hundreds of Palestinians with bombs in retaliation. The intense focus on one gruesome detail amid a pile of dead and maimed bodies shows there is something fundamentally wrong with the way American society approaches war in foreign countries.
