February 21, 2025: Last year there was a story carried by major newspapers reporting that 65 medical personnel working in Gaza had collected evidence of Israeli soldiers deliberately shooting Palestinian children in the head. The proof of this claim was presented in the form of head x-rays of the victims showing bullets inside heads. The reporters, editors and fact-checkers missed the fact that the x-ray evidence was obviously fake. The x-ray evidence consisted of an x-ray image of a child that had been taken by photographing a real child head x-ray with a bullet positioned behind the child’s head or an x-ray of a child’s head with the bullet behind the original x-ray image.

Anyone with experience dealing with those shot in the head would tell you that the bullets do not remain intact inside the head. While some low-velocity pistol rounds will remain intact, the Gaza photos claimed to show the result of Israeli 5.56mm assault rifle bullets. These are high velocity bullets and like most high velocity bullets, these projectiles break up when they enter a person or an animal.

Normally, reputable new media will have fact checkers available who, if they cannot verify something themselves, will know which export to call. In this case, a major police department or hospital would have someone with experience in this area, including the radiologists whose job is to interpret X-Ray photos for hospitals and the medical personnel with a lot of experience treating gunshot wounds.

Errors like this are relatively common when it comes to reporting and fact checking of stories involving the use of criminal, police or military weapons. For example, TV news will sometimes describe all warships as battleships or all combat aircraft as bombers. Another common misidentification is what nationality a group of combat soldiers are. Since the internet began to proliferate thirty years ago, it became even easier to fact check a large number of sources at once by opening a tab on your browser and typing in your question. The result is a page or more of results. Those born after 1990 take it for granted that this is how you get answers. This has caused a sharp decline in the number of encyclopedias, almanacs and similar reference publications.

Given the easily available fact checking resources available, this bullets in children’s heads story appears to be poorly researched and fact checked or deliberately, and stupidly, falsified.