Israel accuses Hamas of brutality which Zionists inflicted on Palestinians

In the days following Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel, US President Joe Biden infamously “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.”

The claim turned out to be untrue, forcing the White House to backtrack Biden’s statement. It admitted that neither the US President nor anyone else in the administration had laid eyes on any pictures which could prove that Hamas beheaded babies in its raid. But the denials and clarification came too late as Biden’s words morphed into a fact on social media.

“Sadly, Israel will now use these false claims to escalate the bombing of Gaza, and to justify its war crimes there,” Israeli journalist Oren Ziv wrote on X on October 11.

The false news has not only played a role in shaping public opinion but is also one example of several uncorroborated claims used to justify Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the besieged Palestinian enclave. Adding to the list are other baseless allegations such as Hamas fighters burning “a little baby in an oven.”

The Zionist disinformation campaign has increased in tandem with the intensification of Israeli military attack on Gaza, David Miller, a British sociologist, whose research and publications focus on Islamophobia and propaganda, tells TRT World.

“The baby in the oven is a good example of the kind of atrocity propaganda that you expect in a conflict like this,” says Miller.

Other unsubstantiated accusations against Hamas, including the killing of pregnant women and their foetuses, come right out of blood-stained Israeli history.

“Both of these are stories which have come from the actual history of Israeli abuses against Palestinians,” says Miller, who is also a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Zaim University.

“In the first case, the baby in the oven comes from the Deir Yassin massacre [before] the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the pregnant woman story is something which actually happened in the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982.

“So, what you see is the Zionists mining their own history for things that they have done, which they can then accuse the Palestinians of, and of course, that's known in psychological terms as projection.”

Miller further elaborated that Zionism as an ideology is “racist” and “genocidal,” but also has within itself “a sense of guilt about what it’s doing, and it kind of is aware of that at the same time jumping up and down, suggesting that the Palestinian resistance factions are the ones who are inhuman.”

Baseless claims and selectively presented facts that use loaded language to elicit an emotional response further Israel’s agenda. Miller says, “The state of Israel is a narcissist who is engaged in such awful things that whenever they accuse their opponent of such things, these are things that they have done themselves — this is a classical, narcissistic trait in psychology.”

He recounts an experience from a 2012 visit to Israel just north of Tel Aviv, where walking along the beachfront, he saw Israelis surfing at seven in the morning as attack helicopters flew over their heads on the way to Ramallah or Hebron. “The overwhelming feeling I had of the people who I met there was the feeling of guilt.”

It’s not as if people in Israel don’t know what’s happening in the occupied territories of Palestine in the West Bank, East Al Quds, and Gaza, says Miller, adding that he believes there is simultaneous support for the occupation and human rights violations amidst the guilt.

“So I think that's what's going on here, that the accusations against the Palestinians, they have to do it for propaganda purposes, but it also says something psychological about the psychology of Zionism.”

In the claim of the baby burned in an oven, Miller says the imagery is used “to evoke the holocaust even subliminally,” as part of the propaganda.

The unfounded claim spread on social media after the president of Israeli volunteer-based emergency medical services United Hatzalah Eli Beer told an audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition that first responders “saw a little baby in an oven” in a home in Southern Israel, alleging that Hamas had turned on the oven with the baby inside.

Israeli authorities did not confirm the news, and the claim about the baby was debunked by Fake Reporter, an Israeli fact-checking and disinformation watchdog group. Others also conveyed scepticism, including Israeli journalists like Haaretz’s Chaim Levinson and Kikar HaShabbat’s Ishay Cohen, noting that different EMS groups and the IDF spokesman’s unit had not yet encountered the case.

At least one case of apparent hate crime referencing burned babies in the oven has taken place in the US, where a lady harassed and hurled Islamophobic words and hot coffee at a man wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf, who was at a playground with his 18-month-old child.

The claim about a baby thrown into an oven, in particular, seems to have been excerpted from an eyewitness account during the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948, when Zionist paramilitary groups went through villages, slaughtering Palestinians.

In the documentary 1948: Creation & Catastrophe, a Palestinian man recalls witnessing a Zionist militia member ordering another villager to throw his son in the oven.

In a letter to the United Nations regarding the Deir Yassin massacre, Fletcher-Cooke of the UK delegation at the time said: “The deaths of some 250 Arabs, men, women and children, which occurred during this attack, took place in circumstances of great savagery.”

He added: “Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities.”

Overall, an estimated 400 to 600 villages were destroyed, including Deir Yassin and 15,000 Palestinians were killed, while an estimated 750,000 fled in fear, accumulating to the event referred to as the Nakba.

Miller added that it’s also part of the Israeli government’s propaganda campaign to suggest Hamas is Daesh, pointing to the hashtag promoted by pro-Israeli accounts.

“They had to find ways to say, look, this is not a Palestinian resistance group resisting the occupation of their land … They want to say these are not just people engaged in armed struggle, not just terrorists, but very, very bad terrorists as bad as the worst terrorists, and that, of course, is ISIS (Daesh).”

According to Miller, Zionist propaganda is tailored to mainstream Western media. It operates under the assumption that “not enough media will carry debunking stories so that their lies will gain currency in the mainstream Western media,” he says.

“They've already lost the battle everywhere else in the world. There is nowhere else in the world where even political elites are supportive of, outside of Australia, perhaps, and Canada.”

The death toll in Gaza at the time of writing has soared to 11,320, including 4,650 children, according to its government media office. The Israeli death toll is estimated to be at 1,200, according to official figures. According to the Israeli military, the number of soldiers killed in its ongoing ground offensive in Gaza has risen to 49.

Before October 7, Miller says the word “genocide” in relation to Zionism was usually thought of as being anti-semitic, even for people who regarded themselves on the left or anti-war.

“But now everyone can see that the mask is slipped — the numbers of statements which have been made by Zionist leaders in the last month calling for actual genocide, for the removal of the [Palestinian] population, for their extermination … Everyone can see now, including people who didn't really even regard themselves as being critics of Zionism, that this is a genocidal ideology.”