by Andrew Fox, spiked
The BBC is still broadcasting thinly veiled Hamas propaganda.
The BBC should be ashamed of its Gaza coverage. The latest embarrassment is the revelation that 53 of the people killed in Gaza who the BBC described as ‘journalists’ were, in fact, Hamas terrorists. As the Telegraph reports, most of the obituaries appeared on BBC Arabic, while 10 featured on the BBC’s English coverage. Among them was Abdullah Darwish, an Al-Aqsa TV cameraman who was also a Hamas fighter who participated in the 7 October attacks.
The BBC’s defence makes matters worse. It claims its reports were ‘based on the information available to it at the time’. Yet the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) removed Darwish and Rizq Abu Shakian, another man featured by the BBC, from its database of journalists, after learning that they were combatants before the Telegraph broke its story. The corporation is now reviewing its coverage, but what were its editors doing when these men’s biographies required checking?
This is a consistent issue in the Gaza war, and one that the BBC should have been aware of. It is a well-known fact that Hamas and other terrorist groups deliberately confuse the roles of journalist and combatant. They do this in order to claim, in the event of a casualty, that Israel has ‘targeted’ a journalist. The BBC has managed to fall for this cynical ploy nearly every time.