At around half past two on the afternoon of August 21st, terrorists based in the Gaza Strip fired a missile at the Western Negev town of Sderot.
“The rocket landed between two homes, near a college and the local train station. Locals said it was “a miracle” that nobody was injured.”
The IDF responded with strikes on Hamas infrastructure in Beit Hanoun and later carried out additional strikes.
The BBC News English language website did not provide any coverage of the missile attack against Israeli civilians.
The BBC Arabic website, however, produced two reports – here and here – about the Israeli response to the missile fire. The second report and the website’s homepage both used a photograph of a water tower allegedly damaged during the Israeli response to the missile attack.
However, as noted at the Israellycool blog, photographs showing the same damage to the same water tower were published by AFP nearly a year ago.
This latest missile attack from the Gaza Strip is the eighth such incident to have taken place in the eight months since the beginning of 2016. The BBC has not reported on any of those attacks on its English language website but has covered the Israeli response to most of them on its Arabic language site.
January 1st: BBC News ignores Gaza missile attacks, BBC Arabic reports Israeli response
January 24th: BBC News ignores Gaza missile attack again – in English
March 11th: BBC News continues to ignore missile attacks on Israelis – in English
March 15th: missile attack not reported.
May 6th: Patchy and selective BBC News reporting of Gaza border incidents
May 25th: BBC News fails to report another Gaza missile attack to English-speakers
July 1st: Another Gaza missile attack ignored by the BBC
August 21st: missile attack not reported in English, response reported in Arabic.
The same pattern of reporting has been evident since the end of the conflict between Israel and terrorists in the Gaza Strip in 2014, meaning that English-speaking BBC audiences – including its funding public – are not receiving the services pledged to them in the corporation’s public purposes.
Update: the BBC News website has now reported this attack – see details here.
