For the 5th time in less than a year, UK Media Watch has prompted a correction in the British media to the false claim that there are “settler-only roads” in the West Bank. The latest such claim was in an op-ed at the Independent by Sophia Brown, a London-based academic (Israel’s assault on Palestinian universities is a threat to human rights and a tragedy for this generation of students, Oct. 22), as we noted in this tweet:
Contrary to your claim (snapshot below) @IndyVoices, there are no "settler-only" roads in the West Bank.
Note that @guardian recently corrected the same error in an article.
See their correction at the bottom of this article: https://t.co/mEZHFqJrNZ pic.twitter.com/56Pu7psFRy
— CAMERA UK (formerly UK Media Watch and BBC Watch) (@CAMERAorgUK) October 21, 2018
We followed up with an email to Indy editors, demonstrating that there have never been “settler-only” (or “Jews-only”) roads in the West Bank”. Editors upheld our complaint and corrected the sentence, which now reads as follows:
Whilst the new sentence, which replaced the false claim that there are “settler-only roads” with the claim that there are “roads which are closed to Palestinians”, is technically accurate, we should stress that the overwhelming majority of West Bank roads are open to both Israeli and Palestinian traffic. According to pro-Palestinian NGOs, only 40 km of roads in the entire West Bank are restricted to Palestinians. To place this restriction on Palestinians in context, Israelis are forbidden to drive on all roads in the PA controlled West Bank (Area A).
In addition to the Independent, over the last year UK Media Watch has prompted corrections to the “settler-only roads” claim at the Financial Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Daily Mail.
(See more CAMERA prompted corrections to variations of this erroneous claim, here, here and here)
