A report by Emily Atkinson which appeared on the BBC News website on February 15th under the headline “Senior UN peacekeeper injured in convoy attack in Lebanon” tells readers that:
“The United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon says its outgoing deputy commander has been injured after one of its convoys was “violently attacked”.
The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) said in a statement that the convoy was taking peacekeepers to Beirut airport when it was targeted and one of its vehicles set on fire. […]
Several videos shared online show one white UN vehicle alight, as a group of young men, carrying yellow flags, chase and beat what appear to be peacekeepers as they attempt to flee.
Separate footage shows a group of men shouting as they kick, hit and climb onto a convoy of three UN vehicles along a dark road.” [emphasis added]
Remarkably, Atkinson could not tell her readers which Lebanese faction has a yellow flag.
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The background to the story is reported as follows:
“Protesters have been blocking the road to the airport following a decision by the Lebanese government to bar two Iranian planes from landing. […]
Supporters of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah have gathered outside Beirut’s airport since Thursday over a stand-off between Lebanon and Iran that saw two Iranian planes barred from landing in the Lebanese capital.
It has left dozens of Lebanese nationals stranded in Iran.
The measure was put in place after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that Iran’s Quds Force had been “exploiting” international flights to “smuggle” funds to arm Hezbollah.
The IDF’s Arabic spokesman Avichay Adraee said it was in contact with the committee monitoring the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire, but alleged: “Despite the efforts made, we estimate that some of these money smuggling attempts have succeeded.””
BBC audiences are not informed that Iran prevented the repatriation of those “Lebanese nationals stranded in Iran” by refusing to allow planes sent to fetch them home to land.
Atkinson closed her report with the following portrayal of UNIFIL:
“Unifil was created to monitor a buffer zone created near the border with Israel following the end of the 2006 Lebanon war, and has posts throughout southern Lebanon.”
UNIFIL was in fact established in 1978. Atkinson’s reference to “a buffer zone” – i.e. a neutral area – “created near the border with Israel” after the Second Lebanon war, is apparently intended to mean the region between the Israel-Lebanon border and the Litani river which is described in UN SC resolution 1701 as “an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL”. However, that resolution tasked UNIFIL not only with ‘monitoring’ that area but also gave it an active role:
“12. Acting in support of a request from the Government of Lebanon to deploy an international force to assist it to exercise its authority throughout the territory, authorizes UNIFIL to take all necessary action in areas of deployment of its forces and as it deems within its capabilities, to ensure that its area of operations is not utilized for hostile activities of any kind, […]”
As is more often than not the case in BBC reporting, Atkinson refrained from informing readers that in all the years since it was passed in 2006, UN SC resolution 1701 has not been implemented, meaning that UNIFIL failed to meet its primary purpose of overseeing the prohibition of Hezbollah’s military presence in southern Lebanon.
It is perhaps therefore not surprising that she also failed to identify those “young men, carrying yellow flags” for the benefit of BBC audiences trying to understand this story.
Cowards. They are afraid of losing their contacts inside Hexbollox so they won’t print anything that might offend them.
Exactly the same goes fro HamaSS.