naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I dunno. I mostly saw the more sober claims of piles of corpses, rapes, and burnings. Claims backed up by Hamas-released footage. What’s this about 40 babies?
There were a lot of very young children killed, along with adults, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some photos that were released and I'm not linking to that were baby-sized bodies that had been both burned and their heads removed. This was initially reported as 40 babies decapitated, but it's likely that this was a conflation of different ages of children, and different causes of death; given the total population of the Kibbutz it's very unlikely that there were 40 <3-year-old infants there.
There's a lot of mid-information social media users that don't really get updates as they come around, and it hasn't helped that a lot of the initial pushback came as complete denial (Hamas spokesman saying that their soldiers wouldn't hurt women or children) or in ludicrous ways (that LA Times moron). A lot of more casual observers just saw the initial confused claim, then people getting dunked on for a bizarre claim that the photos of some of the baby corpses were a photoshopped live dog, without the intermediate bit bringing the specific claim from "40 decapitated babies" to "at least some decapitated babies and a lot of children killed in other ways".
It wasn’t an initial confused claim, though, it was atrocity propaganda, which requires a stable phrase to repeat and a visual image. An IDF spokesperson doesn’t accidentally say “40 babies decapitated”.
I don't think he was a spokesperson per se, but the report did seem to originate from an Israeli soldier on the ground -- there were pictures of him on Twitter that I saw.
It's this guy -- I can't find the tweet that I was thinking of, nor be arsed to dig through the wayback machine for initial headlines which certainly conveyed the impression that there were many decapitated babies killed in some sort of daycare, with the number forty prominently featured.
Anyways, the soldier talks about plural babies and women decapitated, and the PM's spokesperson also talked about multiple babies and toddlers beheaded at that kibbutz -- so far as I can tell there's zero. So whether the claim is forty or just 'some', it seems to be a lie being promulgated pretty high up in the Israeli government, presumably to gin up support for a brutal response.
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Notes -
I dunno. I mostly saw the more sober claims of piles of corpses, rapes, and burnings. Claims backed up by Hamas-released footage. What’s this about 40 babies?
There were a lot of very young children killed, along with adults, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some photos that were released and I'm not linking to that were baby-sized bodies that had been both burned and their heads removed. This was initially reported as 40 babies decapitated, but it's likely that this was a conflation of different ages of children, and different causes of death; given the total population of the Kibbutz it's very unlikely that there were 40 <3-year-old infants there.
There's a lot of mid-information social media users that don't really get updates as they come around, and it hasn't helped that a lot of the initial pushback came as complete denial (Hamas spokesman saying that their soldiers wouldn't hurt women or children) or in ludicrous ways (that LA Times moron). A lot of more casual observers just saw the initial confused claim, then people getting dunked on for a bizarre claim that the photos of some of the baby corpses were a photoshopped live dog, without the intermediate bit bringing the specific claim from "40 decapitated babies" to "at least some decapitated babies and a lot of children killed in other ways".
It wasn’t an initial confused claim, though, it was atrocity propaganda, which requires a stable phrase to repeat and a visual image. An IDF spokesperson doesn’t accidentally say “40 babies decapitated”.
An IDF spokesperson didn't say "40 babies decapitated".
I don't think he was a spokesperson per se, but the report did seem to originate from an Israeli soldier on the ground -- there were pictures of him on Twitter that I saw.
Did he say "40 babies decapitated"?
It's this guy -- I can't find the tweet that I was thinking of, nor be arsed to dig through the wayback machine for initial headlines which certainly conveyed the impression that there were many decapitated babies killed in some sort of daycare, with the number forty prominently featured.
Anyways, the soldier talks about plural babies and women decapitated, and the PM's spokesperson also talked about multiple babies and toddlers beheaded at that kibbutz -- so far as I can tell there's zero. So whether the claim is forty or just 'some', it seems to be a lie being promulgated pretty high up in the Israeli government, presumably to gin up support for a brutal response.
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