On the evening of August 13th the BBC News website published a report headlined “Baby twins killed in Gaza as father registered births”.
The opening paragraphs of that report by a journalist called Gianluca Avagnina, who joined the BBC in April 2022, told BBC audiences that: [emphasis added]
“Newborn twins were killed in Gaza while their father was at a local government office to register their birth.
Asser, a boy, and Ayssel, a girl, were just four days old when their father Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan went to collect their birth certificates.
While he was away, his neighbours called to say their home in Deir al Balah had been bombed.
The Israeli air strike also killed his wife and the twins’ grandmother.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I am told it was a shell that hit the house.””
With Avagnina being based in London, questions obviously arise about the source of his claim that an Israeli air strike in Deir al Balah caused the deaths of two women and two newborn infants. The answer comes in a later paragraph:
“According to AP news agency, the family had followed an order to evacuate Gaza City in the opening weeks of the Israel-Gaza war, seeking shelter in a central part of the strip, as the Israeli army instructed.”
In other words, Avagnina’s report is not based on any original BBC reporting but on a story put out by two AP reporters – Wafaa Shurafa in the Gaza Strip and Samy Magdy in Cairo. The BBC report continued:
“The BBC has asked the Israeli army for comment on the strike, and is waiting for a response.”
This of course is not the first time that we have seen the BBC rush to put out a tragic story without waiting for a right of reply statement from the IDF Spokesperson.
CAMERA UK also approached the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and on August 14th we were informed that: “The details of the incident as published are not currently known to the IDF”.
On the same day, the Times of Israel reported that:
“The Israel Defense Forces said Wednesday that it had no information on reports from Gaza that a Palestinian man’s wife and newborn twins were killed by Israeli shelling on Tuesday.
In response to a query on the incident, the army said that “the details of the incident as published are currently not known to the IDF.” […]
There was no outside confirmation that the home had been hit by Israel. Hamas has at times accused Israel of responsibility for blasts caused by terror operatives’ own munitions.”
Avagnina’s report went on to mention an earlier incident, once again quoting a partisan source upon which previous BBC reporting also relied, along with Hamas messaging:
“Israel says it tries to avoid harming civilians and blames their deaths on Hamas operating in dense residential areas, including using civilian buildings as shelter.
But officials rarely comment on individual strikes.
Several such shelters in Gaza have been attacked in the past few weeks.
On Saturday, an Israeli air strike on a school building sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City killed more than 70 people, the director of a hospital told the BBC.
An Israeli military spokesman said the school “served as an active Hamas and Islamic Jihad military facility”, which Hamas denied.
Israel disputed the number of dead, but the BBC could not independently verify figures from either side.”
Avagnina failed to tell his readers that by the time he wrote his report, the IDF had identified 31 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists killed in that strike on a command and control centre in a mosque in the al-Taba’een school complex in Gaza City’s Daraj neighborhood.
Three days after the appearance of Avagnina’s report, on August 16th, the BBC put out the following Tweet:
The report’s amended headline now reads “Father says baby twins killed by Israeli strike in Gaza as he registered births” and the following footnote has been added:
The report’s opening paragraphs have also been amended to include qualification:
“Newborn twins were reportedly killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza while their father was at a local government office to register their birth.
Asser, a boy, and Ayssel, a girl, were just four days old when their father Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan went to collect their birth certificates.
While he was away, his neighbours called to say their home in Deir al Balah had been bombed.
The strike also killed his wife and the twins’ grandmother.”
The updated version of the report still claims that the BBC is “waiting for a response” from the IDF even though CAMERA UK and the Times of Israel had received responses on August 14th.
As we see, on August 13th the BBC published claims which it had obviously not independently verified, telling its audiences in no uncertain terms that newborn twins had been killed in an “Israeli air strike”.
Three days later, the BBC found fit to qualify that unconfirmed claim, but in the absence of a dedicated corrections page on the BBC News website, it is of course highly doubtful that those who read Avagnina’s report on August 13th, 14th 15th or the morning of August 16th would have revisited it purely on the off chance that it may have been amended.
The BBC has for years promoted itself as a source of “news you can trust” and two years ago the corporation’s CEO of News referred to the “thoughtful work that goes into verifying, fact checking and sourcing our journalism”, adding:
“Wherever and whatever BBC journalists are reporting – whether it’s on the frontlines in Ukraine, on a Covid ward, or on the streets of London during the Queen’s funeral – the BBC editorial guidelines underpin everything we do.
These guidelines are the blueprint for our journalism – ensuring we forensically check and verify facts, double and triple source information, and track down first-hand eyewitnesses.
And that as we pursue the truth, we do so with impartiality and with accuracy. This is our promise.” [emphasis added]
Clearly that promise was not kept in the case of this BBC report. Blindly recycling as fact allegations sourced from a third party without any independent fact checking or verification and then having to qualify those claims days later – in an inadequately transparent manner which will not reach all those who read the original report – does nothing to convince the corporation’s funding public that, as claimed by Deborah Turness, “BBC News delivers the highest quality journalism” or that its claim to be “the most trusted news brand in the world” stands up to scrutiny.
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More Pallywood. But shame on our media for colluding so enthusiastically. None of this has been verified but is being reported with great glee.
So there was a photorapher ready on hand to take the father’s picture and post it on international media with Hamas’s propaganda story. The media knows the routine and loves to join in.