BBC’s Fatah profile misleads on reason for failure of 2010 negotiations

The BBC News website’s profile of Fatah has not been updated in over five years and hence does not provide BBC audiences with any up to date information on the topic of the power struggles within that party or the fate of the 2014 Hamas/Fatah ‘reconciliation’ which caused the last round of negotiations between Israel and the PLO to come to an end.Fatah profile

BBC audiences do however find in that backgrounder a sanitised and inaccurate account of the preceding round of talks.

“…Mr Abbas went to Washington in September 2010, aiming to re-launch peace talks with the Israelis on behalf of all Palestinians. The talks collapsed within a matter of weeks over Israel’s refusal to stop building settlements.”

Audiences are not informed that the Israeli government announced a ten month-long ‘goodwill gesture’ construction freeze in November 2009 or that for nine of those ten months, the Palestinians refused to come to the negotiating table. Only at the beginning of September 2010 did the Palestinians agree to commence direct negotiations and meetings were held in Washington and Sharm el Sheikh. As the construction freeze’s pre-designated time frame drew to a close on September 26th, the PA president and PLO and Fatah leader Abbas demanded its extension, threatening to end the talks if he did not get his way. The result was that on October 2nd 2010 the negotiations ended.

It is not unusual to find misrepresentation of the reason for the end of the 2010 talks in BBC reports – see examples here and here. However, inaccurate information in a backgrounder obviously has the potential to mislead even more and clearly needs correction.

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Inaccuracy in BBC’s Fatah profile exposed

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