The BBC’s international editor has had a busy week.
Between September 18th and September 24th, Jeremy Bowen wrote no fewer than three articles framing the rolling events in Lebanon (while largely managing to ignore those in northern Israel) for BBC News website readers.
Those three articles include repeat messaging on a number of points which Bowen obviously considers integral to the framing of the story that he seeks to promote. [emphasis added]
1. Promotion of the assumption that Israel was behind the explosions of Hizballah communications devices on September 17th and 18th, even though no official acknowledgement has been issued.
September 18th: “Bowen: Tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won’t be deterred”
“Attacking Hezbollah’s communications network has delivered a tactical victory to Israel – the sort of spectacular coup you would read about in a thriller.” […]
“But reports in Al Monitor, a respected Middle East newsletter, say that they were not able to use them in the way they hoped.
The original plan, it says, was for Israel to follow up with devastating attacks while Hezbollah was still reeling. The pager attack, the reports say, was to be the opening salvo in a big escalation – as part of an offensive or perhaps an invasion of southern Lebanon.
But these same reports say that Hezbollah was getting suspicious – forcing Israel to trigger these attacks early. So the Israelis have shown they can get into Hezbollah’s communications and shown they can humiliate them, but these attacks do not take the region one inch further back from all out war. Instead they push it closer.”
[see also: MULTIPLE BBC REPORTS PROMOTE ANONYMOUS UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIMS]
September 24th:”Bowen: Israel is gambling Hezbollah will crumple but it faces a well-armed, angry enemy”
“Israel’s leaders are jubilant about the progress of the offensive against Hezbollah that started with the detonation of weaponised pagers and radios and moved on to intense and deadly airstrikes.” […]
“Take the pager attack. Israel says it was aimed at Hezbollah operatives who had been issued with the pagers.”
2. Promotion of the claim that future events in Lebanon and the north of Israel depend on a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and that Israel’s prime minister and Hamas’ Sinwar are equally responsible for the failure to reach an agreement so far.
September 18th: “Bowen: Tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won’t be deterred”
“Everything at the moment in terms of de-escalation in the Middle East depends on Gaza.
While that war continues, whether it’s conflict with Lebanon, whether it’s attacks in the Red Sea from the Houthis, whether it’s tensions with Iraq; nothing is going to de-escalate.” […]
“American predictions that a ceasefire in Gaza is close have come up again against two seemingly immovable objects.
One is the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, who wants Israel out of the Gaza Strip permanently, as well as a big release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza.
The other is Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has stuck to his insistence that Israel can and will win a total victory over Hamas.”
September 23rd: “Bowen: Israel believes it has weakened Hezbollah but escalation still carries risks”
“The US and UK, and other allies – and critics – of Israel believe that the only hope of cooling this dangerous crisis is to get a ceasefire in Gaza.
Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has said attacks on Israel will go on until a Gaza ceasefire happens. But it seems pretty clear at this point that neither the leader of Hamas nor the leader of Israel is prepared to go for the deal the US has put on the table.”
September 24th:”Bowen: Israel is gambling Hezbollah will crumple but it faces a well-armed, angry enemy”
“But diplomats have their hands tied without a ceasefire in Gaza. Hasan Nasrallah has said Hezbollah will stop attacking Israel only when the Gaza war stops. At the moment neither Hamas nor the Israelis are prepared to make the necessary concessions that would produce a ceasefire agreement in Gaza and a swap of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.”
3. Portrayal of Israeli actions in Lebanon as undermining diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire.
September 18th: “Bowen: Tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won’t be deterred”
“The US envoy to Lebanon Amos Hochstein has been working assiduously for months now – talking to the Lebanese, and indirectly to Hezbollah and to the Israelis, about trying to find a way to deescalate this diplomatically. And reportedly, the Israelis didn’t tell the US about what they were doing with this plan until last moments – so this won’t help his efforts either.”
September 24th:”Bowen: Israel is gambling Hezbollah will crumple but it faces a well-armed, angry enemy”
“Israel’s allies, led by the United States, did not want Israel to escalate the war with Hezbollah and do not want it to invade Lebanon. They insist that only diplomacy can make the border safe enough for civilians to return to their homes on either side of it.”
4. Portrayal of recent events in Lebanon as an Israeli escalation likely to lead to a war, while downplaying the fact that war began on October 8th 2023 when Hizballah attacked Israel.
September 18th: “Bowen: Tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won’t be deterred”
“But once again the region has been pushed right to the brink of an all-out war.
Sooner or later, if this continues, they will fall over the cliff.”
September 23rd: “Bowen: Israel believes it has weakened Hezbollah but escalation still carries risks”
“The war is escalating fast, a process that is being driven by the scale of Israel’s air offensive.”
“Even before the current escalation, well over 100,000 Lebanese had to leave their homes because of Israeli strikes, with no immediate expectation of being able to return.
We are seeing yet another very large escalation by the Israelis.”
September 24th:”Bowen: Israel is gambling Hezbollah will crumple but it faces a well-armed, angry enemy”
“That means Israel, just as reluctant to admit defeat, would have to escalate the war further. If Hezbollah continued to make northern Israel too dangerous for Israeli civilians to return home, Israel would have to decide whether to launch a ground offensive, probably to capture a strip of land to act as a buffer zone.” […]
“Israel’s allies, led by the United States, did not want Israel to escalate the war with Hezbollah and do not want it to invade Lebanon.”
5. Portrayal of Israel’s actions in Lebanon as not conducive to achieving its declared aims.
September 18th: “Bowen: Tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won’t be deterred”
“And it doesn’t get closer to Israel’s strategic aim of stopping Hezbollah’s attacks and allowing the more than 60,000 Israelis on the northern border who haven’t been in their houses for nearly a year to return home.”
September 24th:”Bowen: Israel is gambling Hezbollah will crumple but it faces a well-armed, angry enemy”
“Israel’s offensive rests on an assumption – a gamble – that a point will come when Hezbollah will crumple, retreat from the border and stop firing into Israel. Most observers of Hezbollah believe it will not stop. Fighting Israel is the main reason why Hezbollah exists.” […]
“Israel believes the time has come to be aggressive and audacious, to blast Hezbollah away from its borders. But it faces an obdurate, well-armed and angry enemy. This is the most dangerous crisis in the long year of war since Hamas attacked Israel and at the moment nothing is stopping it spiralling towards something much worse.”
6. Portrayal of Israel’s actions as indiscriminate and/or illegal.
September 18th: “Bowen: Tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won’t be deterred”
“But there is fury and alarm in Lebanon and the wider region that Israel’s attacks appear to have been launched with little concern for bystanders and family members who have been wounded and killed alongside Hezbollah fighters.”
September 24th:”Bowen: Israel is gambling Hezbollah will crumple but it faces a well-armed, angry enemy”
“Some critics as well as enemies of Israel said the warnings were too vague and did not give enough time for families to evacuate. The laws of war demand that civilians be protected, and forbid indiscriminate, disproportionate use of force. […]
Take the pager attack. Israel says it was aimed at Hezbollah operatives who had been issued with the pagers. But Israel could not know where they would be when the bombs inside the pagers were triggered, which was why civilians and children in homes, shops and other public places were wounded and killed. That, some leading lawyers say, proves that Israel was using deadly force without distinguishing between combatants and civilians; a violation of the rules of war.”
7. Promotion of equivalence between the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
September 24th:”Bowen: Israel is gambling Hezbollah will crumple but it faces a well-armed, angry enemy”
“The last week in Lebanon brings back echoes of the last year of war in Gaza. Israel issued warnings to civilians, as it did in Gaza, to move out of areas about to be attacked. It blames Hezbollah, as it blames Hamas, for using civilians as human shields. […]
Israel insists it has a moral army that respects the rules. But much of the world has condemned its conduct in Gaza. The ignition of a wider border war will deepen the gap at the centre of a highly polarised argument.” […]
“Israel may be gambling that Hezbollah will not use all of them [missiles], fearful that the Israeli air force will do to Lebanon what it did to Gaza, turning entire towns to rubble and killing thousands of civilians.”
Equally significant are the topics that Bowen (who, let’s not forget, eleven years ago claimed to have no idea why weapons would be transported to Hizballah via Syria) chooses to ignore or downplay.
The highly relevant topic of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 is very briefly mentioned in only the last of his three articles, with readers told that:
“An American envoy has worked out an agreement, partly based on UN Security resolution 1701 that ended the 2006 war.”
Bowen makes no effort to inform his readers that the chronic failure of the international community and the UN (by means of its ‘peacekeeping force’ UNIFIL) to enforce that resolution throughout the past 18 years is what has led to the current situation and provides no details of that resolution’s content, including its stipulation that the Hizballah terrorist organisation should be disarmed and should not have a presence south of the Litani river.
In that same third article, Bowen tells readers that:
“Israel has not been able to destroy all the tunnels Hamas dug through sand in Gaza. In the borderlands of south Lebanon, Hezbollah has spent the last 18 years preparing tunnels and positions in solid rock.”
Bowen fails to inform his readers of the purpose of those Hizballah tunnels. That omission is particularly notable given that in late 2018, when Israel discovered and neutralised some of those cross-border attack tunnels, BBC audiences were repeatedly told that the operation was actually a cynical politically motivated exercise.
AN OVERVIEW OF BBC REPORTING ON OPERATION NORTHERN SHIELD
Also absent from Bowen’s reports is any mention of Hizballah’s placement of weapons including missiles in civilian residences and facilities in southern Lebanon and the fact that Israeli air force strikes have mainly targeted the launchers used to fire those missiles at Israeli cities, towns and villages.
Jeremy Bowen is by no means the only BBC journalist invested in promoting framing of the events of the past ten days as an Israeli initiated “escalation” which will lead to a war. It is all too obvious that selective framing the story (using some of the same talking points seen in BBC coverage of the war in the Gaza Strip) has taken priority over providing BBC audiences with the information needed in order to understand current and future events.
Related Articles:
BBC’S BOWEN PLAYS DUMB TO WEAVE TANGLED WEB
AFTER PAGER ATTACK, JOURNALISTS AND ACTIVISTS OBFUSCATE FOR HEZBOLLAH (CAMERA)
Also: “war crime” is terrorist being issued communications device who loses control of it. Albeit, the Law of Armed Conflict is unclear.