On July 31st the Qatari media outlet Al Jazeera announced that two of its employees in the Gaza Strip had been killed in an Israeli strike. The following day the IDF put out a statement relating to that announcement.
Visitors to the BBC News website saw no coverage of that story either on July 31st or August 1st.
Readers may recall that back in March of this year, Ismail al Ghoul was arrested during a counterterrorism operation at Shifa hospital. That arrest was reported in two items on the BBC News website as noted here at the time:
“Both in the written report and on the live page, readers are told of the arrest of an Al Jazeera journalist.
“Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera meanwhile reported that Israeli forces had beaten and arrested its correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul during the raid. There was no immediate comment from the IDF.” […]
Readers are not informed that before joining Al Jazeera post October 7th, Sinwar fan Ismail al-Ghoul worked for Hamas media outlets.”
As documented by David Collier and others back in March, before joining Al Jazeera in late 2023, al Ghoul (who had given media coaching on behalf of Hamas’ Ministry of Information) deleted his existing social media accounts and created new ones.
Following a practice that has been seen in the past, on the afternoon of August 2nd the BBC News website published a report by Yolande Knell promoting Al Jazeera talking points.
Titled “Al Jazeera rebuffs Israeli claim killed journalist was Hamas operative”, that report consists largely of quotes from Al Jazeera, al Ghoul’s brother, a Gaza resident who liked his work, a friend and colleagues. Just two paragraphs of Knell’s report relate to the IDF statement put out the previous day. Knell also tells her readers that:
“Al Jazeera, which broadcasts in English and Arabic, has recently seen a series of attacks against its staff in Gaza and their families.
In late October, Wael Dahdouh, the network’s well-known bureau chief, was reporting when he received word on-air that his wife, daughter, a son, and grandchild were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
In December, he was injured in an attack that also killed another Al Jazeera cameraman, Samer Abudaqa.”
Knell of course refrains from informing BBC audiences of Wael Dahdouh’s links to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad before continuing:
“In January, a strike killed Mr Dahdouh’s son, Hamza, and Mustafa Thuria, a video stringer, while they were working for Al Jazeera. The IDF later alleged the men were “members of Gaza-based terrorist organizations”.
Al Jazeera has previously fiercely denied Israel’s claims and accused it of systematically targeting its employees.”
As readers may recall, the BBC also promoted that ‘targeting’ narrative at the time:
MORE BBC AMPLIFICATION OF AL JAZEERA’S ‘TARGETING JOURNALISTS’ FALSEHOOD
Even after the IDF produced evidence to show that Thuria was a Hamas operative and Hamza Dahdouh was a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the BBC continued to stick to its chosen narrative:
BBC NEWS STICKS TO THE NARRATIVE AFTER ‘JOURNALISTS’ EXPOSED
Other stories about terrorists who also functioned as Al Jazeera journalists have been ignored by the BBC:
BBC NEWS IGNORES AL JAZEERA JOURNALISTS STORIES
Knell tells her readers that:
“The [Al Jazeera] network has also condemned the decision by Israel’s government in May to ban its broadcast in the country on accusations it harms national security. Last month, the ban was extended by the Tel Aviv District Court.”
Predictably, Knell has nothing to report about the fact that Al Jazeera chose to provide Hamas with the platform from which to announce its October 7th attacks on Israel. Like other BBC reporters before her, neither did Kell bother to inform readers that Al Jazeera engages in lawfare against Israel or to provide them with relevant context such as its throwing of a birthday party for a terrorist, its record of Holocaust denial and revisionism, its hosting of antisemitic content from the late Muslim Brotherhood leader Qaradawi, its acceptance of an award from Hamas for ‘exemplary coverage’ or the fact that it is funded by the same government that has poured millions of dollars into the Gaza Strip.
Knell’s report includes a photograph captioned “Colleagues attended a vigil for al-Ghoul”. The woman on the left in that photograph, Hind Khoudary, has contributed to previous BBC content despite her association with a Hamas-linked NGO:
BEHIND THE BBC’S “PALESTINIAN JOURNALIST” LABEL
Knell’s report closes:
“There are differing tallies of the number of media workers killed since the unprecedented, deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel that prompted the war in Gaza.
However, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the latest deaths in Gaza bring the number of journalists killed to 113, including 108 Palestinians, three Lebanese and two Israelis who were killed during the 7 October assault.”
In fact, four Israeli journalists (Roee Idan of Ynet, Yaniv Zohar of Israel Hayom, Shai Regev of Ma’ariv and Ayelet Arnin of Kan News) were murdered by Hamas operatives on October 7th but the CPJ removed the names of two of them from its lists because they “were not on assignment to cover the music festival, nor did they have any opportunity to begin reporting on the attack by Hamas militants that killed them on October 7”. One of the names removed was that of Ayelet Arnin. Her employer – Israel’s public broadcaster – recently aired a documentary which shows that she recorded the horrific events for some three hours before she was murdered.
As has been the case in past BBC reporting, Knell fails to clarify that the CPJ’s own data clarifies that a significant proportion of the names on its list were employees of the propaganda arms of Hamas and other terrorist organisations.
On August 3rd, the IDF provided additional information about Ismail al Ghoul:
“The IDF publishes a 2021 Hamas document obtained from the Gaza Strip which it says proves that Al Jazeera reporter Ismail Alghoul was a member of the terror group. […]
The document, which the IDF says was obtained from Hamas computers seized in the Gaza Strip, included the details of thousands of operatives in the terror group’s military wing.
According to the document, from 2021, Alghoul was an engineer in Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade, the IDF says.
“Despite the false attempts by Hamas and Al Jazeera to present Alghoul as a journalist, Alghoul was an active terrorist in the Hamas terror organization,” the military adds.”
As of the time of writing, Knell’s report has not been updated to include that information.
Knell’s report also includes the following:
“Israel has blocked international journalists from entering the Palestinian territory during the war, except on limited and highly controlled visits with the Israeli military. Prior to the closure of its Rafah border crossing with Gaza, Egypt also prevented reporters from entering.
Over 10 months, many networks, including the BBC, have relied on local Palestinian staff for their on-the-ground news coverage and taken on new employees or freelancers.”
As we have had cause to note on numerous occasions in the past, the BBC has repeatedly demonstrated a worrying lack of transparency concerning those “local Palestinian staff […] new employees or freelancers”.
Knell’s latest unquestioning promotion of Al Jazeera talking points once again demonstrates that BBC journalists – including senior staff – continue to display no interest in denouncing the exploitation of their profession by cynical terrorist organisations or in drawing a line between legitimate media organisations and those promoting the interests of terrorist organisations or terror funding regimes.
Related Articles:
BBC COVERAGE OF SHIFA HOSPITAL OPERATION AGAIN PROMOTES HAMAS PROPAGANDA
THE BBC, JOURNALISM AND TERRORISM
BBC NEWS AGAIN CIRCLES THE WAGONS IN REPORT ON AL JAZEERA STORY
From this edition of Camera, it is abundantly clear that all IPC (aka BBC) published reports are based only on data issued by Hamas, PIJ or Al Jazeera – and that facts issued by the IDF are neither used nor quoted. Such is the abuse of its supposed impartial guidelines.