On the afternoon of July 4th a combined vehicular and stabbing attack took place in northern Tel Aviv.
“According to police, the Palestinian assailant rammed his pickup truck into people on a sidewalk on Pinchas Rosen Street, then got out and stabbed others.
He was shot dead by an armed civilian. […]
Four of the victims were listed in serious and moderate-to-serious condition, the nearby Ichilov and Beilinson hospitals said. Another three were listed in moderate and good-to-moderate condition. One person was also brought to Ichilov after suffering acute anxiety.
One of the injured was a pregnant woman. She lost her child due to the severe wounds she suffered in the attack, Hebrew media reports said. It wasn’t immediately clear how advanced her pregnancy was.
The woman was hospitalized in serious condition.
A 30-year-old man was stabbed in the stomach, causing severe wounds, and rushed to Beilinson hospital for surgery.”
Later it was reported that the woman who lost her unborn baby was in the sixth month of her pregnancy.
The terrorist was claimed as an operative by Hamas and two days later that terrorist organisation took responsibility for the attack.
BBC News website coverage of that attack included several entries on its ‘live’ page, only one of which (at 15:00) used the word terrorist in a quote from a police spokesman.
The same filmed item was posted on the BBC News website’s ‘Middle East’ page under the headline ‘Tel Aviv attack: ‘He got out of his vehicle and began trying to stab people’’ and with the following synopsis:
“Israeli police have been speaking to reporters at the scene of the attack in Tel Aviv – they are calling it a terror attack.” [emphasis added]
On the evening of July 4th the BBC News website published a written report by David Gritten titled ‘Tel Aviv: Seven injured in Palestinian car-ramming and stabbing attack’ which opened with some remarkable punctuation: [emphasis added]
“A Palestinian man has injured at least seven people in a car-ramming and stabbing attack in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, Israeli police say.
A police spokesperson said the “terrorist” rammed into pedestrians and then tried to stab them with a sharp object. He was shot dead by a civilian.”
The report goes on to state:
“The attacker has been identified as a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank who was a known Hamas activist.
The Palestinian militant group praised the attack, saying it was a “natural response” to the ongoing major Israeli military operation in Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank.”
The attack itself is described as follows:
“CCTV footage from the scene of the attack in Tel Aviv shows pedestrians and customers of a cafe running for cover as a pick-up truck hits a bus stop on Pinchas Rosen Street.
The driver is seen climbing out of the vehicle’s window and running runs [sic] towards a man standing near the cafe, who he appears to stab several times. He then chases after other people on the pavement.”
In other words, the BBC is perfectly aware of the fact that this was an act of politically motivated violence against random civilians perpetrated by a member of a terrorist organisation which, although it is proscribed in the UK, the BBC cannot bring itself to describe other than as a “militant group”.
Nevertheless, as we see, the BBC continues its long-standing and absurd double standard of unnecessarily qualifying terrorism against Israelis even when the perpetrator is an operative of a proscribed terrorist organisation which has claimed responsibility for the attack.
