On the evening of Wednesday May 1st the BBC News website published an uncredited report headlined “Blinken says ‘time is now’ for Israel-Hamas deal in Gaza”.
That report about the US Secretary of State’s visit to Israel is illustrated with a photograph bearing the following caption:
“Mr Blinken – seen here visiting the Kerem Shalom crossing on Wednesday – said more aid was getting into Gaza but this needed to be accelerated”.
The report itself tells readers that:
“The top US diplomat later visited the Israeli port of Ashdod, about 30km (20 miles) north of Gaza, where he insisted that Israel had made meaningful concessions to reach a hostage and ceasefire deal.
Mr Blinken said Israel had made progress on getting more aid into Gaza but this needed to be accelerated given the immense scale of need.
Ashdod was recently opened to aid shipments destined for Gaza, where the UN has warned of severe food shortages and looming famine.
On Wednesday the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said 30 trucks of humanitarian supplies from Jordan had for the first time entered northern Gaza via the Erez crossing.”
The BBC’s report does not inform readers that the Erez pedestrian crossing was attacked and seriously damaged by Hamas on October 7th 2023. BBC audiences are told nothing of the construction work that had to take place before the crossing could be opened on May 1st for the passage of vehicles.
Prior to arriving in Israel, Mr Blinken had been in Jordan where, as reported by the New York Times and many others, he visited the warehouse from which those “30 trucks of humanitarian aid” departed.
“Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited a warehouse in Jordan on Tuesday where workers were loading trucks for the first attempt to send medical and food aid overland from Jordan to the Israel-Gaza border crossing of Erez. He praised the start of the new aid corridor and also said a pier being built by the U.S. military to bring aid by sea to coastal Gaza would be operational in about one week.
“This is real and important progress, but more still needs to be done,” he told reporters traveling with him across the Middle East this week. “And in particular, we have to make sure our focus is not on inputs, but on impact and really measuring whether the aid that people need is getting to them in an effective way.””
Notably, this BBC report was not updated to inform audiences that the following day, the US State Department spokesman revealed that the thirty trucks seen off in Jordan by Mr Blinken had been hijacked by Hamas after they entered the Gaza Strip via the newly reconstructed Erez crossing.
“Hamas managed to seize a major shipment of humanitarian aid that was delivered to Gaza from Jordan earlier this week, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Thursday, after the supplies were the first to be shipped to the enclave through a newly reopened Israeli border crossing.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken viewed the aid on Tuesday just before it departed from the headquarters of the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization in Amman bound for the renovated crossing into the Gaza Strip at Erez, which was largely destroyed by Hamas during its October 7 terror onslaught that sparked the ongoing war. […]
According to Miller, the aid shipment was unloaded by the Jordanian military inside the Strip before being “picked up by a humanitarian implementer for distribution inside Gaza, and that aid was intercepted and diverted by Hamas on the ground in Gaza.”
“The UN is either in the process or has by now recovered that aid, but it was an unacceptable act by Hamas to divert this aid to begin with,” he said during a press briefing. […]
Hamas held the aid trucks for “some time” before releasing them, according to Miller.”
In February, the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen claimed that he and his colleagues “cannot check Israel’s claims that Hamas is stealing the food”. As we see, after months of avoidance of the topic of Hamas’ theft of humanitarian aid, even a statement from the US State Department did not prompt the BBC to address that issue, either in an update to this particular article or in any other BBC News website content to date.
Similarly, BBC audiences have seen no reporting on a statement put out by COGAT on May 5th according to which it had been asked by international organisations to reduce the volume of goods being transported to northern Gaza, as too much aid was being sent to the area in relation to the size of the population.
This cherry-picking, omitting and editing of news items by the IPC (aka BBC) simply confirms that its News “reports” are merely adaptations of propaganda by Iran – in its stated aim to bring about the end of Israel as a nation state.
A friend asked a Palestinian activist on a London protest march – What does his Imam say will happen to the Jews in the event of “From The River To The Sea” taking place ? His answer – he would not reply to such a question.