by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
The world was told the IDF massacred starving Palestinians. Now the BBC admits it was ‘incorrect’.
1 June 2025. Make a note of that date. For there is a good chance it will be recorded as a day of infamy. As a day when the Jews were once again libelled as the slayers of innocents. As a day when the intellectual classes mimicked their benighted forebears of the medieval era and falsely accused the Jewish nation of spilling blood for sport. For many it was just an ordinary Sunday – but for those who will come to write the history of our times, it will stand out as a day of frenzied hearsay in which Jews were once again branded demons and bloodlusters.
Reports of a massacre in Gaza came early that day. It took place in Rafah, we were told, at one of the distribution centres overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the US-Israel group that’s providing aid to Gaza’s needy. With depthless cruelty, IDF troops opened fire on the half-starved Palestinians queuing for meals. Thirty-one souls were slaughtered in the ‘aid-centre attack’, as the BBC swiftly called it. A venomous fury spread through the internet. No one can deny it now, people cried: Israel is ‘replicating’ Nazi tactics. Just as the Nazis told Jews they were being put on trains for a better life, so the New Nazis promise Palestinians food as ‘a pretext for slaughter’.
There was one problem with these breathless accounts of a wicked massacre: it seems no such thing took place. Last night, the BBC backtracked. It said it has now studied the ‘graphic video’ of the ‘aid-centre massacre’ and has ruled that it is ‘incorrect’. We were told the ‘massacre’ took place early in the morning, yet the ‘direction of the shadows’ in the clip point to an event that took place ‘after 7pm local time’. More devastatingly, the Beeb geolocated the clip and found that it was filmed in a part of Khan Younis that is 4.5km from the nearest aid-distribution centre. A journalist in Gaza confirmed it: the events in the viral clip are ‘unrelated to any aid-distribution site’.