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Protesters hold placards and Israeli flags outside the headquarters of the BBC in London on October 16, 2023, to appeal to the corporation to call Hamas ‘terrorists.’ (Daniel Leal / AFP)
LONDON (CC) - The British Broadcasting Corporation issued an apology last Friday for its unsubstantiated report attributing mass executions in Gaza to Israel's Defense Force. The report on the Israel-Hamas war ran last Christmas Eve, via the BBC's radio station, and accused the IDF of “carrying out summary executions in the Gaza Strip.”
The BBC appears to have yet again taken at value, without independent journalistic ethical investigation and confirmation, statements from Hamas declaring “the Israeli army had carried out the summary execution of 137 Palestinian civilians” in the northern Gaza Strip, since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack that started the war.
There is no evidence to support the London-based BBC's fictitious report on mass executions in Gaza.
This is the infamous and dangerous "fog of war" that Christians must be aware of, especially when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. We must do our due diligence when consuming reports about the Israel-Hamas war. The propaganda is too easy for anyone to present as facts, but there is no excuse for a major news corporation to do so.
Pro-Israel commentators point out that London's current and first Muslim mayor, Sadiq Aman Khan, 53, was born in South London to Pakistani parents. They allege that he holds some sort of sway, political or otherwise, on BBC reports about Jewish Israel.
The BBC's parent company apology marks the third or fourth time, at least, since October 2023 that the prestigious news network had to issue an apology after accusing Israel of wrongdoing - with at least two of those allegations amounting to war crimes if they were true.
The international news outlet haphazardly reported propaganda-like, unverified and later-disproved claims that the IDF launched a deadly explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital on October 17. The embarrassed BBC later apologized for that report, while admitting it had been too fast to cache the blame on Israel.
In mid-November, the Broadcasting Corporation issued another apology after presenting as fact that IDF soldiers had entered Shifa Hospital in Gaza and “were targeting people including medical teams and Arab speakers.”
The latest unverified accusation levied against Israel by the BBC, if Israel indeed did it, would be a war crime according to Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as part of the UN's Office On Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.
The taking of Israeli hostages, during the October 7 terrorist attacks that Hamas carried out, inherently fits under the war crime definition according to the Rome Statute statement.
The BBC's apologetic and defining statement regarding the "summary executions" report said, “although the accusations were attributed and our story contained a response from the Israeli military saying they were unaware of the incident and that Hamas was a terrorist organisation that did not value truth, we had not made sufficient effort to seek corroborating evidence to justify reporting the Hamas claim. We apologise for this mistake.”
The UK's public broadcaster has also drawn widespread criticism for its refusal to call Hamas a terrorist organization. The US government has, for years, designated Hamas as such.
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