Through the fog of October 7 emerged the story of a woman, four months pregnant, whose abdomen was sliced open, her fetus stabbed while she and her children watched, and, when the stabbing was done, the woman was shot and killed, again in front of her children. This, according to Eli Beer, the head of an Israeli rapid response team who claimed he’d seen it “with [his] own eyes.” The story circulated quickly, expanding and contracting like an apocalyptic game of telephone. Another first responder offered the age of one of her children in his account, six or seven years old, and claimed the fetus’s umbilical cord was still attached, the knife left at the mother’s side when he found her.
Superficially, certain details raised suspicions: a fetus, at the end of four months of pregnancy, is about six inches long. Haaretz, Israel’s paper of record and liberal Zionist-leaning, discredited the story in a report published in early December after Israel had killed 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone (anti-Zionist outlets such as this one had established this well before)…..more
