1.
Last Thursday, during an episode of Piazzapulita on Italy's La7 television channel, journalist Francesco Giubilei recalled visiting Kibbutz Kfar Aza after the October 7 massacre and seeing the homes where Hamas terrorists had burned children and babies.
He was rudely interrupted by the show's host, Corrado Formigli, who insisted that reports of children being burned had never been confirmed and were "fake news."
Formigli rebuked Giubilei for substituting impressions for facts before angrily declaring: "I'm sick of hearing falsehoods on television programs! The story of the burned children is false!"
2.
Well, Mr. Formigli, come to Israel. Meet the people who recovered the mutilated and charred bodies. Speak to the pathologists. Examine the lists of families wiped out in the fires, including the names of children and babies. Look at the X-rays of lumps of charcoal that were once human beings, including children.
Your supposedly rigorous journalistic standards led you to declare: "The story of the burned children is false."
What arrogance. What appalling insensitivity.
Hamas terrorists burned people alive and set fire to corpses. That is a fact. Their aim was to leave no trace of their victims, perhaps so that journalists like you could silence others by claiming there was no evidence.
You thought you were upholding the standards of evidence-based journalism. In reality, you contributed to the industry of October 7 denial.
What a moral disgrace.
3.
Mr. Formigli, I understand that you are digging in your heels, insisting this is all "fake news." So I have done a little homework for you.
Here is firsthand testimony from Simcha Greiniman, a volunteer with ZAKA, the Israeli emergency response organization whose members cleared away the blood and horrors and recovered bodies and severed limbs to give the victims one final measure of dignity.
This is what he described seeing at Kibbutz Be'eri:
"We entered a burned-out building. In two rooms, we saw small mounds. We lifted the debris and found a child in the first room, about 5 or 6 years old, judging by the size of the jaw. In the second room, we found another child. The condition of that body was even worse: There was a knife lodged through the head, from one side to the other. A child! And you have to understand that the bodies had been burned ... It was difficult to comprehend the brutality."
Here is testimony I personally recorded from Nathan Koenig:
"When we arrived at the scenes of the fighting and entered the homes, we encountered children who had been slaughtered and burned. I saw two children, one with an ax embedded in the head and the other with a knife. The terrorists had come not merely to kill, but to annihilate.
"In many places, after they had shot and murdered their victims, a Hamas team came through with flamethrowers and incendiary materials to destroy every trace. I saw small, charred bodies. They burned entire families, including babies. I personally handled the burned bodies of a mother and her daughter."
The houses were set ablaze because families were hiding in their reinforced safe rooms, known in Israel as mamad, and the terrorists had trouble breaking in. So they set the houses on fire.
In many cases, everything burned, leaving no clear evidence behind. And that allows a supposedly distinguished journalist in Italy to silence anyone who speaks of burned children on the grounds that the reports have "never been confirmed."
4.
And here is the story of a baby and his parents who narrowly escaped being burned to death at Kibbutz Nirim. Fortunately, they survived to tell of their ordeal, even without a journalist's "confirmation."
Ten days before the massacre, Kai, the first child of Amy and Uriel Laban, was born.
The terrorists tried to force open the family's safe room door but failed. "So they decided to set the house on fire."
For six hours, the family remained trapped in the sealed safe room as their burning home filled with smoke.
The mother recalled:
"I breastfed Kai whenever he cried. Every now and then, when we thought things had gone quiet outside, we opened the window and managed to place him on the windowsill so he could breathe. Every time a terrorist passed by, we threw him back onto the bed, closed the window and ducked down."
Eventually, Israeli soldiers rescued them.
Had they remained there a few more hours, God forbid, they could have suffocated and burned to death. Then a consummate professional journalist like you would have declared there was no evidence they had been burned.
5.
ZAKA volunteer Yossi Landau, a man left shattered by the horrors he witnessed, claimed:
"We entered a house. They had gouged out the father's eye. He was tied up alongside the mother, with their children sitting in front of them. They cut off the mother's breast, severed several fingers from their 7-year-old son and cut off the daughter's foot. Then they set up a table and ate in front of them. Two houses down, there was a pregnant woman. They cut open her abdomen with a knife, with the baby inside, and then shot her. You cannot even call them animals. (we saw) two children with their hands tied behind their backs. They hadn't even been shot. They burned them alive, reducing them to two piles of charred remains."
Is that enough for you, my little journalist?
Editor's note: On Oct. 15, Formigli publicly apologized and acknowledged that he had been wrong to assume the reports were fake news.
