
X (formerly Twitter)
Simon Dixon (@SimonDixonTwitt) on X
Ok, I’m going to actually answer this properly.
Did Hamas target and commit atrocities against children and babies on October 7th?
Atrocities h...
Ok, I’m going to actually answer this properly.
Did Hamas target and commit atrocities against children and babies on October 7th?
Atrocities happened.
Children were among the dead.
Not minimising that for a second.
But “target” and “babies” are doing a LOT of heavy lifting in that question.
Attribution isn’t clean.
We don’t actually know how many Israelis who died that day were killed by Hamas versus killed by Israeli fire.
Because the military invoked the Hannibal Directive, firing on their own people to stop them from being taken.
Haaretz documented it.
No full breakdown exists.
Take the “40 beheaded babies” story.
The one a sitting US president repeated from a podium.
No verified basis.
The White House quietly walked it back.
According to the documented casualty records, one baby under the age of one, 10-month-old Mila Cohen, was killed on October 7th.
Another newborn died afterward following injuries sustained by its mother.
Kfir Bibas was taken hostage as a baby and died later in captivity.
The image burned into everyone’s head was, on the record, false.
And no, knowing that isn’t minimising the dead.
It’s refusing to be moved by a manufactured version of them.
Even the most famous case remains disputed.
Kfir Bibas and his brother Ariel.
Hamas claimed an Israeli airstrike.
Produced zero evidence.
Israeli forensics found no injuries consistent with a bombing and said they were killed by their captors.
Now, “targeting.”
The deadliest site that day was the Nova festival.
Israel’s own security establishment concluded Hamas had no advance knowledge the festival was even there.
Hamas’s own account says the same thing.
So the claim that they specifically planned to target a rave full of kids doesn’t survive contact with either side’s record.
And before you ask about the sexual violence, here’s exactly what the most-cited source actually found.
The UN envoy, Pramila Patten, found “reasonable grounds to believe” sexual violence occurred at some locations, including serious forms of sexual assault.
But her mission also acknowledged important limitations.
It was not an investigative body.
It did not meet a single survivor of sexual violence from that day.
It did not establish that sexual violence was systematically ordered.
At least two publicised allegations were found to be unfounded.
Indicators were circumstantial.
Position of bodies.
State of clothing.
Evidence that required careful interpretation rather than automatic conclusions.
And that flagship newspaper investigation into mass sexual assault?
The outlet shelved the podcast built around it and faced serious questions about its reporting.
The claim of a centrally ordered, systematic campaign requires evidence beyond what those UN investigations established.
And if we’re applying a consistent moral standard, the same concern must extend to Palestinian babies and children killed or harmed, and to documented allegations of sexual abuse in Israeli detention before, during and after October 7th.
Here’s the part that actually matters.
Taking October 7th as an isolated event.
Cut off from the history.
The occupation.
The documented record of false flags.
The incentives that decide which stories get amplified and which get buried.
That’s reacting to a single frame of a film you never watched.
That isn’t analysis. It’s the raw material of propaganda.
A mind reacting to the frame instead of the film has been handed its conclusion before it even started thinking.
That’s literally what the machine is built to produce.
Outrage on demand, aimed wherever it’s needed that week.
Two things can be true at once.
You can grieve every single person who died AND refuse the manufactured version of how they died.
The moment you need the event to mean only one thing, your mind isn’t yours anymore.
It belongs to whoever framed it for you.
And what they actually wanted to do followed.
And no, it wasn’t defence.
@Simon Dixon
20.10.26
#simondixon
This X post is in response to a question posted also on X:
“Simon, did Hamas target and commit atrocities against children and babies on October 7th?”