BBC reporting on Gush Etzion terror attack

The BBC once again refrains from describing a terror attack as such in its own words.

On the morning of August 8th the BBC News website published a report titled “Israel hunts killer of off-duty soldier in West Bank” on its ‘Middle East’ page. The report has since undergone various amendments but the headline and opening paragraph describing Dvir Sorek as an “off-duty soldier” even though he had yet to undergo any military training remain unchanged.

Unsurprisingly, the only use of the word ‘terrorist’ throughout the report came in direct quotes from the Israeli prime minister and an IDF spokesman.

One hundred and five of the report’s 414 words were given over to uncritical amplification of statements from a terrorist organisation.

“There has been no claim of responsibility for the killing, though a spokesman for Hamas, the Palestinian militant group which rules the Gaza Strip, justified the attack.

“The Etzion [Jewish settlement bloc] Operation was as much as a response to the crimes of Occupation, the latest of which was the one committed at Wadi Hummus; it is also a response to the continued occupation of the Palestinian territory,” Hazem Qasim said.

He was referring to the recent demolition by Israel of Palestinian homes in the area of Wadi Hummus which Israel said were built illegally too close to the separation barrier in the West Bank.”

Towards the end of the report readers were told that:

“Cpl Sorek’s killing has echoes of the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the same area of the West Bank in 2014.

The murders of Naftali Fraenkel, 16, Gilad Shaer, 16, and Eyal Yifrah, 19, triggered a massive search in the West Bank, and eventually escalated into a conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza.

The killers of the teenagers came from Hamas.”

As has been noted here on numerous other occasions in the past five years when the BBC has presented a similarly misleading portrayal of the background to Operation Protective Edge:

“…the BBC has completely airbrushed from audience view the hundreds of missiles launched at civilian targets in Israel between the date of the kidnappings – June 12th – and the commencement of Operation Protective Edge on July 8th. It was of course that surge in missile fire which was the reason for Israel’s military action, with the later discovery of dozens of cross-border tunnels prompting the subsequent ground operation. The military operation could have been avoided had Hamas elected to take advantage of the ample opportunities it was given to stop the missile fire before July 8th, but the terrorist organisation chose not to do so – for reasons not by any means exclusively connected to Israel.”

A filmed report embedded into that article and also posted separately on the BBC News website described the victim as a soldier, without the term “off-duty”. While that portrayal is technically correct, it is also irrelevant seeing as the attacker would not have been aware of the fact that he had recently been recruited.

Listeners to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme on the morning of August 8th were told in a news bulletin (from 2:07:04 here) that:

“An Israeli soldier has been found stabbed to death near a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. The 18-year-old is thought to have been off-duty at the time of the attack near Hebron. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he was killed by a Palestinian.”

Once again the victim was described as a soldier even though the IDF spokesman had clarified that:

“The slain youth is a resident of Binyamin [in Samaria] and a yeshivah student in Migdal Oz. He had begun his recruitment into the IDF but had not yet served. He was still in the studying stage at the yeshivah.”

As for the BBC’s claim that the Israeli prime minister had, by 10 a.m. local time on August 8th, said that the victim was “killed by a Palestinian” – we have been unable to find anything on the prime minister’s social media accounts or in reports by the local media such as Ha’aretz, Ynet, the Jerusalem Post or the Times of Israel to support that BBC claim.  

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BBC News report omits significant information

 

 

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