On November 13th BBC Hampshire & Isle of Wight promoted a report which appeared on its BBC News website page.
That report by BBC South Online journalist Marcus White – ‘Gaza surgeon describes drones targeting children’ – opens by telling readers that:
“A retired surgeon who volunteered at a hospital in Gaza has told MPs that Israeli drones would target children who were lying injured after bombings.
Prof Nizam Mamode, from Brockenhurst, Hampshire, worked at Nasser hospital for a month in August and September.
Giving evidence to the parliamentary International Development Committee, he broke down as he described children’s accounts of being shot by quadcopters.
Labour MP Sarah Champion, who chairs the committee, said his evidence was “profound and deeply chilling”.”
White continues his report with uncritical repetition of some of the statements made by Mamode to that parliamentary committee, including the following:
“”We [were] operating on children who would say: ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.’
“That’s clearly a deliberate act and it was a persistent act – persistent targeting of civilians day after day.””
However, experts have noted that Mamode’s statements do not stand up to scrutiny. As Andrew Fox has explained in a post well worth reading in full:
“To deal with the specifics of his testimony. The comment that drew the most attention also raises the most red flags:
The drones would come down and pick off civilians—children. We had description after description. This is not an occasional thing. This was day after day after day of operating on children who would say, “I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped, and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.” That is clearly a deliberate and persistent act; there was persistent targeting of civilians day after day.
This is deeply implausible, and unsupported by any evidence other than the hearsay repeated by Mr Mamode. As he says later in his testimony, “Luckily, I was never anywhere near a drone firing, so I can only comment on what we saw when people came in.”
There are a number of issues with his suggestion. First of all, IDF conventional forces do not have the drone capability he suggests. I have checked with three independent sources at various levels in the IDF. […]
He also alleges two very strange phenomena with these drones:
Luckily, I was never anywhere near a drone firing, so I can only comment on what we saw when people came in. We would see people with sometimes a single entry point, sometimes two or three. What we did see on one or two occasions was a very disturbing pattern where there would be three or four shots on each side of the chest, and again in the groin. That, we all thought, was prima facie evidence of an autonomous or semi-autonomous drone, because a human operator would not be able to fire with that degree of accuracy that quickly.
This also makes no sense. Bodies fall and move when hit by rounds. They do not stand there, get hit repeatedly and sequentially in three separate places, then fall over. The only way that wounding pattern described could happen is if someone were stationary on the floor. Not implausible, but to suggest it as “prima facie” evidence of drone usage is just plain silly—not to mention that there is no evidence of any army in the world currently fielding autonomous or semi-autonomous drones. This is simply a fictional capability.
In addition, he said, “The bullets that the drones fire are these small cuboid pellets. I fished a number of those out of the abdomens of small children.” I know of no small arms weapon that fires cuboid munitions. This is for a very obvious reason: cubes are not aerodynamic and would therefore be extremely inaccurate: the opposite of the extreme robotic accuracy Mr Mamode alleges. […]
Remember, he specifically said he had not witnessed the things he was told, and he is repeating hearsay. So someone in this reporting chain is lying. Is the good doctor lying? It is possible, but we have no evidence for that.
Have the wounded children been told to lie? Possible, but again, unlikely. It is highly possible, of course, that they were mistaken. The aftermath of explosions are terrible and confusing things. Shrapnel from a blast combined with a drone examining for battle damage is an entirely more plausible solution: still terrible, but not necessarily a war crime.
So if not the doctor and not the children, who is lying? We do not know if Mr Mamode is a fluent Arabic speaker. There’s no indication on his CV that he is fluent in Arabic, which means he must have used an interpreter. Given that what he describes is physically impossible, someone must be lying. My bet is on the interpreter. Child says one thing; interpreter gives the Hamas line to take; doctor repeats line to take to the British Parliament.”
Not included in White’s report is another claim made by Mamode, according to which “medical aid was sitting at the border and not being allowed in”. As Mark Zlochin has explained:
Also absent from White’s reporting is any mention of the fact that (as noted by Andrew Fox) during his testimony, Mamode cited the letter published by the Lancet in July, inaccurately describing it as “a paper”.
“Mr Mamode’s testimony also raises concerns as he canters through the pro-Palestinian narrative’s greatest hits. He manages to fit in the widely-condemned letter to the Lancet from earlier this year (note: this was correspondence, not a peer-reviewed paper as he suggests).
A paper in The Lancet in July estimated—because of the casualties that have been counted, those who were likely to be under the rubble and all those who were dying from other diseases as a result of the war—conservatively 186,000 dead. Those were the figures up to June, so, to my mind, it is over 200,000 now.”
Notably, despite the inclusion in his report of a photograph showing Mamode wearing a head covering bearing the logo of the charity ‘Medical Aid for Palestinians’, White fails to inform BBC audiences that his trip to the Gaza Strip was organised by that highly problematic anti-Israel NGO. That omission is even more notable given that White made that point clear in a previous report about the same surgeon which he wrote in early October.
In addition, White’s report promotes statements from the MP chairing the committee, without clarifying that less than a week after Hamas had invaded Israel and massacred over a thousand people including babies, children and senior citizens, she was already promoting the notion of “collective punishment” in the Gaza Strip.
“In a statement after Tuesday’s hearing, Ms Champion said: “On this evidence, the UK needs to take seriously the prospect of international humanitarian law having been egregiously broken in Gaza.
“The Committee will do all we can to act on Professor Mamode’s extraordinary testimony and ensure his experiences are heard loud and clear.””
White does not inform his readers that, like Mamode, Sarah Champion also went on a visit to the region organised by ‘Medical Aid for Palestinians’ (together with CAABU) in 2015, after which she wrote:
“…we must recognise that the Israelis use the Palestinian violence in Gaza as a politically convenient red herring to stall negotiations. It is that violence that I repeatedly heard being used as a justification for why Israel needs to take the security measures it does. The violence stops the world from clearly seeing Gaza as the horrendous humanitarian crisis that it is, but at least we are aware of it.”
In January 2016 the Jewish Chronicle reported the following:
“The government must set up a “watchlist” of Israelis who have committed war crimes by detaining and interrogating Palestinian children, a Labour MP has claimed.
Sarah Champion said the Israeli Defence Forces were guilty of “mass intimidation and collective punishment” of Palestinians in order to protect Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
Leading a debate on the issue in Westminster Hall on Wednesday, the Rotherham MP called for a list of “all known war crime suspects” who attempt to enter Britain. […]
Ms Champion visited the Palestinian territories last September as part of a Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu) delegation. After returning to Britain she was forced to correct a series of tweets and an article she had written which contained inaccuracies about Palestinians obtaining supplies in Gaza.”
Clearly the interests of the BBC’s funding public in the UK (not to mention parliamentarians) would have been better served had Marcus White not simply made do with uncritical amplification of statements made at that select committee meeting but instead had provided some factual background concerning the claims made.
BBC audiences would also have benefitted had White informed them of the records of anti-Israel political activism of both the committee chair and the “retired surgeon” whose social media posts (which include Holocaust analogy) suggest anything but an objective, professional stance, as well as the political agenda of the NGO which organised Mamode’s visit to the Gaza Strip.
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Some years ago Sarah Champion MP called out the grooming gangs in Rotherham stating categorically that the perpetrators were of Pakistani Muslim descent. This did not go down well in the Labour Party at the time. Despite being an MP since 2012 she has not been appointed to any government post. This ‘report’ by her on Gaza may well be an attempt to regain favour in the party in the hope that she might benefit from the current administration when there is a reshuffle. Cynical of me I know, but let’s wait and see.
Profound, chilling and a complete pack of lies. Anyone who believes a word from the mouth of a Labour politician needs immediate help, the same goes for any BBC Middle East news report, the BBC is stacked high with pro Iranian sympathisers #defundthebbc
Problem is Camera’s lack of exposure to the general public – and this could partly be solved by deliberate “leaking” of issues to UK press media – including The Telegraph,
Daily Mail, Private Eye and other neutral journals.
Yeah right. A child gets shot four times by modern munitions (cubes which happen to not even exist) yet survives and tells the good doctor the same story as lots of other incredibly super-tough kids. All through a Hamas interpreter. He is either incredibly gullible or is motivated by A-S.
Whatever happened to the practice of cross-examination? He woudn’t last 5 minutes of questioning even by a neutral barrister, let alone a munitions expert.
‘he is from an ethnic minority with a Muslim background and
went to a Mosque as a child’ (NHS Employment Tribunal). Probably where he learned his A-S. Why didn’t the good doctor volunteer to work in Syria or Ukraine or Sudan, where many more children are killed? But not by the You-Know-Whos.