Israel releases photos of babies 'killed by Hamas', says Netanyahu showed them to Blinken

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Thursday showed visiting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken horrific pictures of babies he said were killed by Hamas militants in Israel over the weekend.

The pictures were posted by the prime minister's office on X, formerly Twitter. One picture showed a dead baby in a body bag while the other showed the charred remains of another infant.

Israel is reeling under a deadly attack that was carried out by Hamas fighters on Saturday morning in which at least 1,200 people, most of them civilians, were killed in Israel and around 150 hostages abducted to Gaza.

In response, the Israeli military has launched a blistering aerial and artillery bombardment that has killed more than 1,350 people in the Gaza Strip, most of them civilians.

Blinken described to reporters what he saw in the photographs shown to him by Netanyahu: "A baby -- an infant -- riddled with bullets. Soldiers beheaded, young people burnt alive in their cars.

"For any human being to see this, it's really beyond almost anything that we can comprehend and digest," Blinken said.

"Images are worth a thousand words. These images, maybe worth a million.

"The world is seeing new evidence of depravity and the inhumanity of Hamas -- depravity and inhumanity directed at babies, at small children, at young adults, at elderly people, at people with disabilities.

"At a basic human level, how anyone cannot be revolted and cannot reject what they've seen -- and what the world has seen -- is beyond me," Blinken said.

US President Joe Biden too had expressed outrage over the images coming out of Israel.

"I've been doing this for a long time," Biden said at the White House late on Wednesday. "I never really thought that I would see -- have confirmed -- pictures of terrorists beheading babies."

A White House spokesperson later clarified that US officials had not confirmed such reports independently. The president had based his comments on the claims from Netanyahu's spokesman, the spokesperson said.

Earlier on Thursday, Hamas had rejected claims its fighters had killed infants during the cross-border attack it launched on Saturday.

"The world will discover the fake and false Israeli narrative, which disseminates misinformation about alleged atrocities committed by the Palestinian resistance," Hamas political bureau member Ezzat al-Rishaq said in a statement issued in English.

"Such allegations have never been proven; no evidence has been submitted to support such false claims."