Israel’s Channel 13 recently published a report by its Arab affairs correspondent Hezi Simantov concerning Hamas documents publicised by the IDF’s Arabic language spokesman. [translation: CAMERA UK]
“In an internal intelligence document of the military wing of Hamas from 2020, it was revealed that the terrorist organisation is aware of the high percentage of failed launches by the Islamic Jihad and the danger they pose to houses near launch sites and that it even approached the PIJ with a request not to place launchers near Hamas operatives so as not to endanger them.
Another document from the year 2022, belonging to the Hamas military coordination department, describes how the PIJ’s Jerusalem brigades, which carried out a failed launch that caused casualties during Operation Breaking Dawn, hid the matter and suggested presenting the incident as the fall of an Iron Dome interceptor in order to blame Israel. […]
The IDF put its hands on many additional documents that show how aware the terrorist organisations are of the results of the failed launches, but the method of operation is clear – to hide the information and blame Israel.
The IDF spokesman added that also in the current war a significant percentage of failed launches carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been recorded. According to the data, about 11% of the launches carried out by the terrorist organisations against Israel since October 7 fell in the territory of the Gaza Strip.”
Simantov notes that those failed launches include the incident at Al Ahli hospital in October 2023 that Hamas tried to blame on Israel and which was shown to have been the result of a shortfall missile fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. As readers no doubt recall, to this day the BBC has been ‘unable’ to inform its audiences what happened at Al Ahli hospital on October 17th and continues to present that story in terms of “competing claims and counterclaims”.
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The Channel 13 report also notes that the Hamas documents show that during Operation Breaking Dawn in 2022, even when casualties caused by shortfall missiles were recorded as such by Hamas in internal documents, the Hamas-run health ministry – which of course is regularly quoted by foreign media outlets including the BBC as the prime source for casualty figures – listed those deaths as having been caused by Israeli strikes.
Since the beginning of the current conflict the BBC has uncritically promoted casualty figures and breakdowns provided by Hamas sources and continues to do so even as analysts cast growing doubt on their reliability.
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There is of course nothing novel about either the BBC’s uncritical promotion of casualty figures provided by a terrorist organisation (it embraced that practice at least a decade ago) or its dogged insistence on turning a blind eye to the issue of Palestinian deaths caused by shortfall missiles or other factors.
What is notable, however, is that since the establishment of the fact-checking and anti-disinformation department BBC Verify in May 2023, audiences have seen no improvement whatsoever in the corporation’s ability to provide them with reliable information on the topic of Palestinian casualties which is not sourced from a terrorist organisation that exploits that issue for propaganda purposes.
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