Israel-Palestine war: UK press watchdog 'considering' complaints into 'beheaded babies' reports

The UK’s press watchdog says it is looking into “a number of complaints” that it has received over front-page stories alleging that Hamas fighters beheaded babies at a kibbutz in southern Israel.

John Davidson, a spokesman for the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), told Middle East Eye: “We have received a number of complaints about several articles which we are considering.”

IPSO's comments come as the White House on Wednesday walked back President Joe Biden’s claim that he saw photos of beheaded children.

More than 1,300 Israelis have been killed since Hamas' surprise attack on Saturday, including many who were killed during assaults on several kibbutz in southern Israel. 

But Israeli army and government officials have made a series of seemingly inconsistent statements over the past 24 hours about the assault on Saturday at the Kafr Aza kibbutz:

- An Israeli army spokesperson, Major Nir Dinar, told Business Insider late on Wednesday that it will not seek further evidence regarding the claim that fighters had beheaded babies. Further investigation would be “disrespectful for the dead”, he was quoted as saying.

- In a Newsnight interview aired on Wednesday night, Israeli Ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely said: “Just yesterday, we exposed - and I think it was actually published in the BBC - that 40 bodies of babies, that their heads were cut off." 

The BBC’s Mark Urban responded that the BBC had seen “no evidence of that”. She then said: “We’ve seen the bodies of those babies and children and actually this is evidence-based.”

- On Thursday morning, CNN reported that an Israeli official said they had not confirmed the specific claim that Hamas fighters had beheaded babies at Kafr Aza. “There have been cases of Hamas militants carrying out beheadings and other ISIS-style atrocities. However, we cannot confirm if the victims were men or women, soldiers or civilians, adults or children," the official told CNN.

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- The front pages of many of the UK’s leading publications – including the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Times, and the Daily Telegraph – carried details on Wednesday morning of the alleged killings of 40 children, including babies, in the Hamas assault on Kfar Aza on Saturday.

The reports were largely based on comments made by an Israeli soldier to Israel’s i24 news channel with the caveat from some outlets that, while they were reporting it, they could not verify the claim.

Following their publication, Oren Ziv, a journalist from +972 magazine, who also visited Kafr Aza, said he had not heard or seen evidence to corroborate the reports, and an Israeli army spokesperson told MEE that it could not confirm any numbers.

Though unverified, the story gathered pace with posts about the story on the social platform X picking up 44 million impressions by mid-Wednesday, Marc Owen Jones, an academic researching disinformation in the Middle East, told MEE.