On the afternoon of Friday November 8th, the BBC News website published a report by Mallory Moench under the following dramatic headline:
The sensationalist nature of that headline becomes evident already in the first paragraph as readers discover that its 70% claim relates only to verified deaths during an six month period of the war. [emphasis added]
“The UN’s Human Rights Office has condemned the high number of civilians killed in the war in Gaza, saying its analysis shows close to 70% of verified victims over a six-month period were women and children.”
Readers later discover that the uncredited UN report released on the same day relates to less than 19% of the 43,300 “Gaza war dead” claimed by the Hamas terrorist organisation which started the war.
“The UN agency said it verified the details of 8,119 people killed in Gaza from November 2023 to April 2024.
Its analysis found around 44% of verified victims were children and 26% women. The ages most represented among the dead were five to nine-year-olds.”
Failing to clarify that Hamas deliberately fails to distinguish between civilian and combatant casualties for propaganda purposes, Moench tells readers that:
“Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures the UN sees as reliable, has reported a death toll of more than 43,300 people over the past 13 months. Many more bodies are believed to remain under the rubble of bombarded buildings.”
The link in that paragraph leads to a BBC report from August 2024 which was previously discussed here:
BBC NEWS CONTINUES TO PROMOTE HAMAS CASUALTY CLAIMS
Nowhere in her report does Moench refer to the fact that IDF data shows that some 17,000 Hamas operatives and members of other terror groups have been killed by the IDF in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7th 2023.
Neither does she have anything to tell her readers about the relevant issue of the exploitation of child soldiers by Gaza Strip based terrorist organisations.
In paragraph two Moench notes that the UN report states that “some deaths may have been the result of errant projectiles by Palestinian armed groups” and in paragraph seventeen of her 24-paragraph article she makes another vague reference to the relevant issue of shortfall missiles fired by Palestinian terrorist organisations, such as the one fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad which caused the explosion at al Ahli hospital in October 2023, after which Hamas claimed 471 deaths.
“The UN said Palestinian armed groups have waged war from densely-populated areas and indiscriminately used projectiles, likely contributing to the death toll…”
Moench does not however clarify that the UN’s report makes no effort to distinguish between deaths caused by Israeli strikes and those resulting from “indiscriminately used projectiles”, meaning that the latter are included in its 70% claim.
Although she fails to provide her readers with any context concerning the long-standing anti-Israel bias of UN Human Rights bodies and officials, Moench provides plenty of uncritical amplification of their claims.
“The report said it found “unprecedented” levels of international law violations, raising concerns about “war crimes and other possible atrocity crimes”.”
“The report said the data indicates “an apparent indifference to the death of civilians and the impact of the means and methods of warfare”.”
“UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said in a statement that “this unprecedented level of killing, and injury of civilians is a direct consequence of the failure to comply with fundamental principles of international humanitarian law”.
He cited the laws of distinction, which requires warring parties to distinguish between combatants and civilians, proportionality, which prohibits attacks where harm to civilians outweighs military advantage, and precautions in attacks.
Türk called for a “due reckoning with respect to the allegations of serious violations of international law”.”
In addition, Moench fails to comply with BBC editorial guidelines on impartiality by informing readers of the “affiliations, funding and particular viewpoints” of the representative of a political NGO with a long history of anti-Israel activity whose entirely predictable statements she uncritically quotes.
“Jan Egeland, the head of aid organisation Norwegian Refugee Council, told the BBC on Friday that he saw “devastation, despair, beyond belief” on a recent visit to Gaza.
“There is hardly a building that is not damaged. And large areas looked like Stalingrad after the Second World War. You cannot fathom how intense this indiscriminate bombing has been on this trapped population,” he said.
“It’s evident that it is first and foremost children and women who are paying a price for this senseless war,” he added.”
Not only does the BBC’s sensationalist, tabloid-style headline to this report mislead and misinform BBC audiences but the article itself fails to do little other than provide context free and entirely uncritical amplification of claims from less than objective sources.
Moench makes no effort whatsoever to address the UN report’s many problematic aspects. As observed by Mark Zlochin:
“This is what @UNHumanRights themselves say about their “verification methodology”:
“That a large proportion of the fatalities verified by OHCHR were killed in residential buildings or similar housing is also partly explained by OHCHR’s verification methodology, which requires at least three independent sources, and the challenges in collecting and verifying information of killings in other circumstances.”
In other words, their “methodology” makes it much more likely to leave out fatalities that were not killed “in residential buildings or similar housing” and/or those that could not be confirmed by at least three independent sources.
You know, like those that were killed in face-to-face combat with IDF, for example.
It also makes their analysis heavily biased towards the relatively rare mass-casualties events that are much more likely to be witnessed by several independent witnesses and leaves out many of the precision strikes with low or no collateral damage.”
As also noted by Mark Zlochin, the actual demographic breakdown of all casualties claimed by the Hamas health ministry – not just the 19% in particular circumstances during a particular time period – shows that the biggest age categories are men aged 25-29 and 30-34.
The BBC was not the only media outlet to run such a misleading headline: the Guardian and Voice of America did the same, with the latter having later been amended thanks to CAMERA.
CAMERA UK has submitted a complaint to the BBC requesting the amendment of this report’s inaccurate and misleading headline.
Related Articles:
GUARDIAN GROSSLY MISLEADS ON CIVILIAN CASUALTIES IN GAZA
VOA CORRECTS HEADLINE MISCASTING UN’S PARTIAL FINDINGS ON GAZA WAR DEAD
