BBC mantra on Gaza casualties further challenged by new information

Readers cannot have failed to notice that the standard insertion into any BBC report relating however circumspectly to last summer’s conflict in Israel and the Gaza Strip goes along the following lines:BBC

“The war left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead, the majority civilians, according to the UN.”

As has been noted here on numerous occasions over the past few months, the BBC continues to promote those problematic UN supplied figures to its audiences without having carried out any independent verification of civilian/combatant casualty ratios and whilst concurrently ignoring the fact that investigation into the lists of casualties provided by Hamas and other Palestinian sources carried out by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center indicates a different picture.

On February 11th the Center published an additional report relating to the subject of seventeen casualties classified by Hamas’ Information Office as ‘journalists’ – and therefore categorized as civilians. The Jerusalem Post reports:

““The study, not yet complete, found that eight out of the 17 names were operatives who belonged to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, or who worked in Hamas media outlets,” the report, published Thursday, stated.

“The Palestinian Journalists Union and the Gazan branch of the Information Office tried to hide the military-terrorist identity of the terror operatives, and present them as journalists in every way,” it added.”

Notably, two of the people listed who really were civilians were not killed during Israeli operations.

“AP photographer Simone Camilli and Palestinian translator Ali Shehda Abu Afash, both who appear on the list, were killed during a truce while covering Palestinian police sappers who were trying to neutralize unexploded Israeli munitions. There were no IDF units in the area at the time.”

As we have previously noted:

“The footnote added belatedly to the BBC article on casualty figures which was revised due to political pressure stated:

“We expect to return to this subject at a later date.”

That has not happened and the BBC’s continued blind promotion of unverified statistics is clearly not only an issue in terms of accuracy but, as time goes on and the BBC continues to stubbornly and inexplicably ignore later work done on this topic, it also obviously becomes a growing issue of impartiality.”

Related Articles:

BBC Complaints defends its use of Hamas supplied casualty figures

BBC promotion of the inaccurate notion of exceptional civilian casualties in Gaza

 

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