The May 20th edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme included news bulletins and items relating to a statement “on the situation in Gaza and the West Bank” put out by the UK, France and Canada.
At 1:09:45 listeners heard presenter Nick Robinson interview a dentist in the Gaza Strip, followed by a conversation with the BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen and comments from Robinson on the topic of ‘genocide’.
At 2:10:24 listeners heard presenter Anna Foster introduce another long item on the same topic which included a nearly nine-minute-long interview with UN OCHA’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Tom Fletcher. Notably, listeners were not provided with any information about the record and activities of that UN body.
Early on in that interview (from 2:13:36), listeners heard the following from Fletcher:
Fletcher: “Let me describe what is on those trucks. This is baby food. Baby nutrition. There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them. This is not food that Hamas are gonna steal.”
Foster failed to ask her interviewee for the source of that number, which he repeated some five minutes later. [emphasis in italics in the original]
Fletcher: “I want to save as many of these 14,000 babies as we can in the next 48 hours.”
Foster: “14,000 babies in 48 hours is an extraordinary figure.”
Fletcher: “It’s chilling. It’s utterly chilling. But this is what we do. We keep going.”
Although BBC audiences had not been provided with any information to support the assertion that 14,000 babies were going to die within 48 hours, the BBC chose to post that claim on its website and promote it on social media a couple of hours later.
Some five hours later, listeners to the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘World at One’ heard the following (from 08:45 here) from presenter Sarah Montague:
Montague: “Earlier today there was an almost unbelievable claim made by the United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher on the Today programme this morning about aid in Gaza.”
Recording Fletcher: “Let me describe what is on those trucks. This is baby food. Baby nutrition. There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.”
Montague: “Well the United Nations was asked how they came up with that figure of 14,000 babies. Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, didn’t repeat the claim but he did say ‘we know for a fact that there are babies who are in urgent life saving need of these supplements that need to come in because their mothers are unable to feed themselves and if they don’t get those, they’ll be in mortal danger’.”
Fletcher’s unevidenced claim was still being promoted over 15 hours after it was made on a BBC News website live page which – coincidentally or not – had earlier provided a link to his live ‘Today’ interview.
A later entry on that same live page read as follows:
That latter link takes those bothering to click on it to a ‘special snapshot’ IPC report from May 12th titled “Gaza Strip: Acute Malnutrition Situation for April 2025 – March 2026” which states that: [emphasis added]
“Nearly 71,000 children under the age of five are expected to be acutely malnourished over the next 11 months (April 2025-March 2026). Of these, 14,100 cases are expected to be severe. “
In other words, Fletcher replaced “malnourished” with “die”, swapped “expected to be” with “will”, turned “children under the age of five” into “babies” and substituted “the next 11 months” with “the next 48 hours”.
Incredibly for a media organisation which purports to provide accurate and impartial news, the BBC promoted Fletcher’s dramatic yet totally inaccurate claim for hours on multiple platforms before anyone thought to check the plausibility of that “almost unbelievable” and “extraordinary figure”.
By then, however, it was too late. That disinformation had been picked up and promoted by, among others, the Guardian, LBC, the Independent, The National, Time, members of the UK parliament and a member of the Scottish parliament.
Nearly twelve hours after the BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ interview with Fletcher had been aired, the BBC News website published a report which includes the following:
Nevertheless, the following day saw Fletcher’s disinformation continue to be promoted on the BBC News website.
Two days on, that inaccurate claim has still not been removed:
Once again the BBC’s supposed commitment to providing “news you can trust” is shown to be nothing more than a slogan.
Related Articles:
BRITISH MEDIA PROMOTE UN’S ‘14,000 DEAD BABIES’ LIE
BBC NEWS CONTINUES TO PROMOTE A NARRATIVE ON FAMINE IN GAZA
BBC AGAIN CORRECTS ICJ INACCURACY FOLLOWING CAMERA UK COMPLAINT
It was interesting to hear how the Today anchor, Anna Foster, a seasoned broadcaster, speciality in reporting the Mid East events in Israel from, yes not Israel, but Beirut, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/mar/10/bbc-news-anna-foster-to-join-radio-4-today-programme , https://muckrack.com/annaefoster deliberately chose, perhaps on the instructions of the Today program anti Israel editors not to press Fletcher on the source of the numbers. Her predecessor, Mishal Husain, had he been a UK Conservative minister, or even a spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, would have pressed without let up, cutting short Fletcher’s diatribe, to request him to answer the question. Shame on her!