The "Rafah Tent Massacre" and the Myth/Truth of Beheaded Babies

The verification of the headless and burned children was produced before our very eyes.

These beheaded babies needed no verification.

Their charred and headless bodies, dangling from the arms of a man shouting into the camera, affirmed what had unfolded only minutes before.

Before the viral video raced across digital platforms and claimed a permanent plot in our minds, Rafah became the site of one of this genocide’s most gruesome massacres.

A massacre not measured by scale of death or degree of destruction, but a metric far more sinister. Evidence that we saw in naked, living color, projected onto the screens of our mobile phones that double as mortuaries these days.

Our phones are murder sites, morbid black mirrors where headless Palestinian babies hang from the blooded hands of refugees, camped behind humanitarian centers reduced into death camps.

This past bloody Sunday was another turning point; a downward spiral into a nadir that supersedes the technical and existential depths of genocide. Particularly for those headless small bodies, and the fully grown ones tasked with hoisting them up for all to see.

Sunday May 26, 2024 will be forever be remembered as the “Rafah Tent Massacre,” at least from the subaltern lens and pens of voices foreclosed from the privileged process of writing history and producing journalism.

If that Massacre mandates any one thing, it is to barge into those enterprises and etch into words the gory images forever etched into our memories.

Images of beheaded babies that could be verified by age and name, face and parents. Dramatically unlike those forty beheaded Israeli babies that filled the mouths of politicians hellbent on genocide, and media headlines beating the drums of a siege that would decimate a people and their plot of land.

There was no video evidence. Just hearsay.

No names or ages of the alleged babies were produced. Merely rhetoric from American presidents and Israeli prime ministers primed for genocide.

Without verification, the myth of beheaded Israeli babies was echoed by Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the corporate media architecture conspiring with the plot to destroy Gaza. The degree of journalistic malfeasance cannot be understated, as leading newspapers printed and peddled the lie without checking sources, and imperial scholars scrambled to produce history from fiction.

As Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels stated, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”  Particularly those already invested in the decimation of the Palestinian people, and others sitting on the imperial fence of knowledge monopolized by the acolytes of genocidal culprits.

The march of genocide rolled over the lie and those bent on exposing it, as Israel and the United States trampled the rule of law, journalistic and scholarly ethics, and a global community that incessantly called for ceasefire at the United Nations and the halt of genocidal acts at the highest courts.

There were no confirmation of beheaded Israeli babies. But it did not matter.

The myth had been weaponized and the story morphed into a genocidal vendetta that displaced millions and murdered thousands, conjured up in the halls of American and Israeli power to – once again – indiscriminately punish the “uncivilized” and repay the “savages.” Villains with no names or faces, indicted on account of nationality and ethnicity alone, locked away in an open-air prison camp of their making.  

231 days of genocide ensued, unabated by human rights law and the American will to flatten it. Flattened like that makeshift encampment behind the UNRWA office in Rafah, where bombs were dropped on Gazans with nowhere left to turn.

In between the lie and the last massacre, evidence of the beheaded babies was finally produced. It sprung from our screens, so violently vivid, that we could not turn away even if we tried.

Many of us, haunted by the ongoing scroll of genocidal murder from the past seven months, did try with all of our will. But the pull of horror was indelible.

A baby. Or what was once a baby.

His head severed from his little body by a two-thousand-pound bomb made in America, held by a mad man as evidence – (in)human evidence – for the entire world to see.

Verification. Finally.

Not of beheaded Israeli babies. But Palestinian babies.

Fact not fiction, burning in the minds and hearts of millions shook by an image that marked yet another turning point.

Another flour massacre.

Another Al Shifa siege.

Another uncovered mass grave.

Another Aaron Bushnell.

Another Hind Rajab.

Another smoking gun.

Another body of evidence that signals that this genocide has descended into something far more sinister; spiraled into a depth far more hell than earth.

The truth is right there. Hanging headless before our eyes.

The verification is available for The New York Times and Washington Post, the BBC and CNN, without having to hunt it down.

Yet, their headlines redacted word of these Palestinian babies like American bombs removed their heads.

On a landscape ravaged by unhinged Israeli militarism and unchecked American might, the lie of headless Israeli children means everything; while the truth of beheaded Palestinian children means nothing.  

We must face this imperial word, head on.

Then confront it, by memorializing the events of genocide then beheading it with the swing of our pens that bleed dignity into the headless bodies of babies.

The truth of witnessing their headless bodies, years from now, will mean nothing it we do not unwrite the lies of their killers.

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Khaled A. Beydoun is an author and law professor. His daily insights can be viewed on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.

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