On the morning of October 27th the BBC News website published a report which was originally headlined “Dozens injured after truck hits bus stop in central Israel”. Around half an hour later, that report was amended to include the following statement:
“A spokesman for Israel’s ambulance service quoted by Israeli newspaper Haaretz said many of the injured were elderly citizens who had disembarked from a bus ahead of a visit to the nearby Israel Defense Forces (IDF) base in Glilot.”
Clearly the BBC journalist who wrote that version of the report did not ask him or herself why a group of “elderly citizens” would be visiting an army base or fact check that information. As CAMERA UK pointed out to the BBC, the victims of the attack were in fact on their way to a museum.
Some three and a half hours later, that disinformation was removed from the BBC’s report, the headline to which was amended to read “One dead, dozens injured after truck hits Israel bus stop”.
Now credited to Lucy Williamson, the version of that report currently available online also includes a video of her reporting from the scene. The written report tells BBC audiences that:
“A man has died and at least 30 more have been injured after a truck hit a bus stop near an Israeli military base north of Tel Aviv, in what authorities are investigating as a suspected terror attack.
“A truck hit dozens of people who had disembarked at a bus stop. Eight of the wounded were trapped under the truck and others were lying and walking near it,” a medic for Israel’s Magen David Adom (MDA) emergency service said.
Many of the injured were reportedly pensioners on a day trip to a nearby museum.
The driver of the truck, named as Rami Natur, an Arab Israeli from the town of Qalansawe in central Israel, was shot dead by a civilian at the scene.”
The BBC has not updated its report to provide information concerning the victim murdered in that attack – Bezalel Carmi, 72, from Rishon Lezion – or to clarify that subsequent investigations have strengthened suspicions that the incident was a terror attack. Neither have BBC audiences been informed that this vehicular attack targeting senior citizens was praised by Hamas as “heroic”.
In both her written and filmed reports, Williamson tells BBC audiences that:
“Israel is already fighting its enemies on multiple fronts in Gaza and Lebanon.
But this attack raises a different question: how to keep its people safe from attackers already inside Israel, who use vehicles as weapons.”
Curiously, Williamson appears to be unaware of the fact that the targeting of Israeli citizens by terrorists using “vehicles as weapons” long predates the wars in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Since October 2023, the Israel Security Agency has recorded some sixteen vehicular attacks, three of which were perpetrated by “attackers already inside Israel”, as Williamson puts it. Only one of those incidents received coverage on the BBC News website, with additional attacks in Jerusalem and Nir Tzvi having been ignored.
Of course had the BBC provided its audiences – and its staff – with adequate background information concerning the rise in terrorism that has been encouraged and facilitated by Iranian-backed terrorist organisations for over three years, Williamson might have been able to inform her readers and viewers that Israel’s answer to that “question” of “how to keep its people safe” is counter terrorism operations and policing.
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