BBC News ignores follow-up on promoted MSF claim

On June 25^th the BBC News website published a report by David Gritten headlined “‘High risk’ of famine in Gaza persists, new UN-backed report says”.

The closing paragraphs of that report (which will be discussed separately) reads as follows:

The link provided by Gritten leads to a Tweet put out by the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) which received a reply the following morning from COGAT.

Later on June 26^th the Times of Israel reported a response from MSF:

“The medical charity Doctors Without Borders says it has no indication that one of its employees, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, was a terror operative as claimed by the Israel Defense Forces. […]

Doctors Without Borders, known by its French name Médecins Sans Frontières, says Israel has not provided evidence about its claim.

It says al-Wadiya was a medic and physiotherapist who worked for the group between 2018 and 2022, having resumed work with the charity during the war. It says he was killed on his bicycle while riding to work. […]

“There is no justification for this; it is unacceptable. Healthcare workers must be protected and should not be targeted,” the group argues in a statement.”

Not long after that, the IDF released photographs of al-Wadiya in PIJ uniform.

At the time of writing, Gritten’s report has not been amended to inform BBC audiences that the IDF did not merely ‘accuse’ al-Wadiya of being “a “significant [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad terrorist” who had developed the group’s rockets array” but also provided evidence.

The BBC has quoted and promoted Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) both during the current conflict and in previous years. As documented here previously, a British doctor volunteering with MSF has contributed extensively to BBC content on the topic of casualty figures and incidents at the al Ahli hospital and others.

BBC LONDON PROMOTES ACTIVIST DOCTOR AND MORE AL AHLI MUDDYING

This is not the first example of an MSF employee having links to a terrorist organisation.

A year ago BBC Verify asked audiences “What would you like us to investigate?”. Clearly some serious – and long overdue – inquiry into the issue of the terror connections of NGOs and UN bodies regularly quoted and promoted by the BBC would be of considerable benefit to both BBC audiences and to the credibility of the BBC itself.