This claim is a calculated piece of disinformation built on a deliberate sleight of hand: by conflating a specific, disputed numerical detail — the unverified figure of "40 beheaded babies" — with the broader, forensically documented reality of infant and child murders on October 7, it attempts to erase the verified deaths of multiple babies entirely. The two questions are entirely separate. Whether Hamas beheaded exactly 40 babies is one question. Whether Hamas murdered babies at all is another — and on that second question, the evidence is overwhelming, documented by Israeli forensic pathologists, international wire services, survivor testimony, and Hamas's own GoPro footage. To argue that scrutiny of one specific, unverified number disproves all infant deaths is not fact-checking; it is denial.

The Documented Facts

According to data compiled by the Israeli National Center of Forensic Medicine, the October 7 death toll of approximately 1,195 Israelis included two infants, twelve children under the age of ten, and thirty-six youths aged 10 to 19. These are not propaganda figures — they are the product of forensic identification work so intensive that Israeli archaeologists were called in to assist with victims whose bodies were so severely mutilated and burned that conventional identification was impossible. The notion that only one baby died is contradicted by the official forensic record itself.

• Mila Cohen, ten months old, was shot to death in the arms of her mother by Hamas gunmen. She is named and documented. She was not the only infant killed.
• Na'amma Abu Rashad was born during emergency surgery after Hamas terrorists shot her pregnant mother in the abdomen. The newborn survived only one day. She is a documented infant death directly caused by Hamas's attack.
• Omer Siman Tov, aged two, was murdered alongside his entire young family in their safe room at Kibbutz Nir Oz. His death, too, is named, sourced, and verifiable.
• Hamas terrorists wore GoPro cameras and posted footage of their killings to Telegram in real time. Documents recovered from the bodies of attackers instructed them explicitly to kill and kidnap civilians. Hamas, in the Washington Institute's assessment, produced some of the most damning evidence of its own atrocities.

The Origins and Anatomy of the "40 Babies" Claim

The specific figure of "40 beheaded babies" originated from an eyewitness account relayed by i24NEWS correspondent Nicole Zedeck citing an Israeli soldier on October 10, 2023, shortly after the attack. The claim was widely amplified, including by some officials, before journalists and fact-checkers noted that the specific number and the specific method of beheading had not been independently verified with forensic documentation at that moment. This reporting caveat — that the exact figure of 40 and the precise characterization of beheading was unverified — is legitimate and unremarkable in war-zone journalism.

What is not legitimate is the leap that anti-Israel propagandists have made from that caveat to the wholesale denial of infant deaths. The ADL has specifically addressed this pattern, noting that attempts to dismiss the documented atrocities of October 7 as "unverified or fake" echo the tactics of Holocaust denialism: targeting a peripheral detail to cast doubt on an extensively documented horror. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, addressing the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025, described Hamas terrorists as having "burned babies alive in front of their parents" — an account consistent with documented forensic findings reported by first responders at Kibbutz Be'eri and other attacked communities.

The "genocide justification" framing appended to this claim deserves direct rebuttal. Israel's military campaign in Gaza was triggered by the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Characterizing the forensic documentation of that massacre as fabricated propaganda designed to manufacture consent for genocide is itself a form of incitement: it denies Jewish victims their humanity while simultaneously delegitimizing the democratic state's right to respond to a devastating act of war. It is not journalism; it is the architecture of dehumanization running in reverse.

Why This Myth Persists and Why It Is Dangerous

Disinformation campaigns targeting October 7 follow a consistent structure: identify one unverified or overstated detail, use it to challenge the credibility of the entire body of evidence, and then rhetorically substitute the specific disputed claim for the broader documented reality. The "40 beheaded babies" figure was indeed never confirmed with a precise forensic count. But the deaths of infants, toddlers, and children on October 7 are not in dispute among any serious investigative authority. Hamas's own leadership initially celebrated the attack as a "dazzling triumph." Its operatives filmed themselves committing atrocities. Survivors described what they witnessed. Forensic teams processed the remains.

Allowing this myth to go unchallenged causes concrete harm. It erases the identities of murdered children — children like Mila Cohen, Na'amma Abu Rashad, and Omer Siman Tov — by folding their deaths into a disinformation narrative. It weaponizes legitimate journalistic skepticism about one unverified number to deny victims their existence. And it serves the political interest of those who seek to recast Hamas, a designated terrorist organization that explicitly targets Jewish civilians as a matter of stated ideology, as a legitimate resistance movement falsely accused. The forensic and testimonial record of October 7 is among the most thoroughly documented mass atrocity events of the modern era. No propagandistic sleight of hand can erase it.