On the evening of January 23rd the BBC’s expanding ‘anti-disinformation’ department BBC Verify published a report on the BBC News website’s ‘Middle East’ and ‘BBC Verify’ pages under the title “Satellite imagery reveals Israeli military construction in buffer zone with Syria”.
Credited to no fewer than three members of BBC Verify staff – Paul Brown, Richard Irvine-Brown and Alex Murray – that report opens as follows:
“Newly released satellite imagery shows Israel Defense Forces (IDF) construction taking place within the demilitarised buffer zone that separates the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from Syria.
The image, obtained exclusively by BBC Verify, shows building work taking place at a location more than 600m inside what is known as the Area of Separation (AoS).”
That rather unhelpful image – which does not include any coordinates – appears along with another which is likewise sourced from the American company Planet Lab PBC.
The report goes on:
“Under the terms of Israel’s ceasefire agreement with Syria in 1974, the IDF is prohibited from crossing the so-called Alpha Line on the western edge of the AoS.
When contacted about the images, the IDF told the BBC its “forces are operating in southern Syria, within the buffer zone and at strategic points, to protect the residents of northern Israel.”
The fact that the IDF began operating in southern Syria as the Assad regime fell has of course been known since early December 2024. BBC Verify fails to clarify that the Syrian army forces situated east of the Bravo Line under the terms of the 1974 disengagement agreement quickly abandoned their positions as the regime collapsed.
Later in the report, readers discover that the “construction” apparently consists of a small number of prefabricated units.
“Jeremy Binnie, Middle East specialist at defence intelligence company Janes, told us: “The photo shows what appear to be four prefabricated guard posts that they will presumably crane into position in the corners, so this is somewhere they are planning to maintain at least an interim presence”.”
The report goes on to promote links to previous BBC reporting from the same area, while misleading readers with the inaccurate claim that Majdal Shams is located “within the buffer zone”: [emphasis added]
“The BBC has previously filmed military forces near the town of Majdal Shams, which is within the buffer zone and around 5.5km from the new construction.
In November, satellite imagery also showed the IDF building a trench following the Alpha Line on the western side of the buffer zone, stretching past Jubata al-Khashab.”
That second link takes readers to a November 2024 report by Lucy Williamson (to which Richard Irvine-Brown also contributed) that was also based on images supplied by Planet Lab. As was noted here at the time, that report failed to substantiate the claim made in its headline – “Israeli construction along buffer zone with Syria violates ceasefire, UN says” – but BBC Verify’s report nevertheless goes on to provide yet another link to the same report:
“The United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) has previously said that Israeli construction along the AoS with Syria amounts to “severe violations” of the ceasefire agreement.”
While BBC Verify is obviously very keen to promote the notion that Israel is violating a fifty-year-old ceasefire agreement, it fails to clarify that the party that signed it on the Syrian side no longer exists. As was the case in Williamson’s November report, the writers of this one also completely ignore the fact that a decade ago, during the Syrian civil war, UNDOF largely abandoned the demilitarised zone (or AoS as the BBC prefers to call it) and redeployed to the Israeli side for several years or that both the Syrian army and assorted armed groups were active in that supposedly UNDOF enforced demilitarised area.
One of those armed groups was of course Jabhat al Nusra, which later rebranded itself as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and subsequently became part of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – the group which overthrew the Assad regime in early December and was described by the BBC at the time as an “Islamist militant group”.
As noted here earlier this month, the BBC has failed to provide its audiences with adequate information concerning the de facto Syrian regime’s appointment of foreign fighters – including designated terrorists – to senior positions in its armed forces. Such background, along with information about the relationship between Syria’s de-facto leader and the former Jabhat al Nusra funder and Hamas supporting Qatari regime, would of course have helped BBC audiences better understand the background to this story than trite, context-free accusations of “violations of the ceasefire agreement”.
Related Articles:
BBC REPORT FAILS TO SUBSTANTIATE THE ALLEGATION MADE IN ITS HEADLINE
CROSS-PLATFORM BBC PROMOTION OF ‘UNNECESSARY PROVOCATION’ NARRATIVE