Israeli regime has killed 7,112 children – err, dolls – in Gaza since Oct. 7

By Humaira Ahad

In the Gaza Strip, a child is killed every 10 minutes ---wait--- a “doll” dies every 10 minutes.

An article published on December 9 in the Jerusalem Post, which has since been deleted, accused the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network of misrepresenting a doll as a dead Palestinian baby.

The child dubbed a “doll” by the Israeli media was a five-month-old Muhammad Hani Al Zahar who was killed in the Deir Al Balah neighborhood when the Zionist regime resumed its bombing campaign against the besieged territory after the expiration of a temporary truce.

Al Zahar’s mother said after their neighbor’s house was shelled by Israeli forces, she rushed outside in panic with her five-month-old baby.

For some time, she believed that the infant was asleep but later discovered after arriving at the hospital that her son was among those dead in the bombing.

The images of the bereaved grandfather holding the slain child in his arms, grieving inconsolably in the compound of Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, immediately went viral on social media.

The Israeli media instantly claimed that a “doll” was being portrayed as a slain child.

Many Israeli social media accounts, including those of the Israeli regime embassies in France and Austria, joined the bandwagon and posted on their handles that the child featured in the viral video was a “doll” and not an infant who had a life and family.

Israeli propagandist Yoseph Haddad was the first one to tweet the outrageous claim.

“The fact that Hamas allegedly tweeted a video of a doll to deceive the public exposes how hard the lying and slanderous propaganda arm of Hamas and the Palestinians works,” wrote Haddad.

The official handle for ‘Uncensored News Network’ Voice of Europe tweeted the viral clip, parroting the same claim and referring to the baby as a “doll”.

The viral claim was also shared by many Israeli journalists and the self-proclaimed fact-checking organization Israel War Room which called it a ‘spectacular blockbuster’ by “Pallywood”.

Lie has no legs

As the saying goes, a lie has no legs. The false Israeli claim that a dead child is a “doll” was busted when journalists in Gaza posted the details of 5-month-old Muhammad killed in an Israeli airstrike.

“I shared the name of this baby, and still Israeli media are claiming he is a doll. No, he is not a doll. He is a human that was killed by Israeli airstrikes,” Anadolu Agency photojournalist Ali Jadallah wrote in an Instagram story.

Wafa, a Palestinian news agency affiliated with the Palestinian Authority, also published pictures of the same child, identifying him as five-month-old Muhammad Hani al-Zahar.

After facing massive backlash, The Jerusalem Post was forced to delete the article and issue a statement of corrigendum for publishing a false story.  

The explanation, which was too little and too late, drew criticism from many X users.

“Over the weekend, we shared an article based on faulty sourcing. The article in question did not meet our editorial standards and was thus removed,” the newspaper posted on its X handle.

It, however, stopped short of mentioning the article it was referring to in the statement.

"This is the most unprofessional retraction/correction I've seen since I started reading newspapers regularly almost 50 years ago," wrote an X user.

“You claimed a dead baby, killed by an Israeli airstrike, was a doll. If you want to offer a correction and apology you have to say what it is for,” another X user stated.

Another netizen, writing to the Post, said it was “gross that you won’t admit what the story is.”

The still appearance of 5-month-old Al Zahar, with eyes wide open, was due to rigor mortis.

Rigor mortis is the stiffening of muscles after death, caused by chemical changes that affect muscle fiber elasticity and eyes, if not closed, lose their tension, appearing more relaxed.

Another “doll”

On October 12, four-year-old Omar Bilal Al-Banna was playing with his elder brother Majid outside their home in Al Zeitoun, a residential neighborhood in Gaza, when an Israeli airstrike struck.

The strike killed Omar and led to the death of more than 50 others.

However, in line with its dehumanizing propaganda against Palestinians, the regime said that Omar was not a real human and Hamas was allegedly using “dolls” to make fake corpses of children.

“Hamas accidentally posted a video of a doll (yes a doll) suggesting that it was a part of casualties caused by an IDF attack,” the Israeli regime’s official Twitter account posted with a photo encircling his face and a video of Omar’s corpse.

A pro-regime account declared: "Hamas is desperate… It released a video showing a dead Palestinian baby. But wait for the catch. It's not a real baby; it's a doll".

As usual, the claim was repeated by Twitter accounts of the Israeli regime’s embassies in France and Austria and the Facebook account of the regime’s foreign ministry.

The video that was posted by the Israeli regime was shot by a Palestinian photojournalist Momen El Halab. El Halabi has been covering and documenting the Israeli atrocities on Palestinians for years.

El Halab told Alt News that the boy seen in the video was 4-year-old Omar Bilal Al-Banna who was killed in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, east of Gaza City.

He also shared several other pictures of Omar with the news network for further context.

Al-Banna’s mother Yasmeen confirmed that her son had been killed by an air strike, adding that lies about the "killing of children and innocent people are untrue and fake".

"They have no right to say he is a doll," she said. "They [the Israeli government] are lying and evading their crimes and massacres," Yasmeen added while mourning for her 4-year-old son.

Death toll of “dolls”

The Palestinian death toll from Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip has soared to 16,248 people, the government media office in the besieged Palestinian enclave said on Tuesday.

The victims include more than 7,112 children – no, actually “dolls” – which are manufactured in the besieged strip. There are hundreds of “dolls” who remain unaccounted for.

On December 1, Catherine Russell, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, warned that Gaza is once again “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”.

Russell said hundreds of children will die each day if violence returns to the scale and intensity seen before the seven-day pause in fighting that ended on Friday.

The Défense for Children International-Palestine, an NGO, said in early November that Israeli forces killed twice as many Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip in October as the total number of Palestinian children killed in the occupied West Bank and Gaza combined since 1967.

As per the statistics shared by Save the Children, at least 101 Palestinian children have been reportedly killed in the occupied West Bank this year.

“It is long past time to stop violations against children’s rights and to provide long-lasting safety to children in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. Anything else will fail to provide them with the future they deserve,” said Jason Lee, Country Director for Save the Children.

But why are all these people from the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations, even some heads of state referring to children?

The regime has been claiming that the corpses that are shown as dead children are “dolls”.  So, there is a grave problem, either the world is mistaken or the Israeli regime has upgraded its filthy propaganda of spreading lies to a disgusting level.

Dehumanizing Palestinians

Palestinians have been dehumanized for decades; however, the dehumanizing campaign has reached a new high since October 7 when the Hamas resistance movement launched the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying regime.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly deployed racist terminology to label Palestinians as the “children of darkness” who live by the “laws of the jungle”.

Ordering a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip with “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”, Israel’s military affairs minister, Yoav Gallant said the regime is “fighting human animals.”

In the past “cockroaches” was the word used by former chief of staff of the Israeli military MK Rafael Eitan to describe Palestinians.

Some others have labeled Palestinians as “cancer”, and “vermin”, and called for them to be “annihilated.”

When the Israeli regime says the numbers are “inflamed”, the United States agrees and the Western media doubts whether the carnage unfolding before their eyes is real because the vile Israeli propaganda has takers as the children killed in Gaza are “dolls”.

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