Last week the BBC News website published several items relating to strikes carried out on May 13th around the European hospital in Khan Younis.
The first of those reports appeared on the evening of May 13th and was originally headlined “Israeli air strike on hospital kills at least six people in Gaza, local officials say”.
As noted by some commentators, only in the final paragraph of the first two versions of that report were readers given any information concerning the reported target of the strikes:
“Israeli media is reporting the target of the strike was senior Hamas figure Mohammed Sinwar – the younger brother of the former Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.”
The version of that report currently appearing online is titled “Israeli air strike on hospital kills 28 people in Gaza, civil defence says” and is credited to Rushdi Abualouf and Ruth Comerford, neither of whom are located in the Gaza Strip.
In that latest version of the report readers have to reach the eighteenth paragraph before they are told that:
“Israeli media reported the target of the strike was senior Hamas figure Mohammed Sinwar – the younger brother of the former Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.
Hamas has not commented on these reports.
Mohammed Sinwar is believed to have taken command of the group’s military wing, following the death of Mohammed Deif in an Israeli strike last summer.”
BBC audiences are told nothing more about Mohammed Sinwar’s record which, as reported by the Times of Israel, includes the following relevant information:
“Following the killing of Hamas’s top military commander, Muhammad Deif, last July, Muhammad Sinwar took charge of the terror group’s military wing. Later, after Sinwar’s older brother was killed by IDF troops, he became the de facto leader of the terror group in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials have described Muhammad Sinwar as obstinate with regard to negotiations with Hamas for the release of hostages, and an obstacle to reaching a ceasefire deal.
The younger Sinwar is also wanted for terrorist actions against Israel and has been active in Hamas for decades.
He was jailed by Israel in the 1990s for nine months and spent an additional three years in a Palestinian Authority prison in Ramallah, from which he escaped in 2000. In 2006, Sinwar was part of a Hamas cell that abducted IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. He also previously commanded Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade.”
That latest version of the report quotes a British surgeon:
“Dr Tom Potokar, a plastic surgeon working with the Ideals international aid charity, was in the hospital when it was hit.
Speaking to the BBC’s Newshour programme, he described “six enormous explosions one after the other” that directly hit the hospital with “no warning whatsoever”.
“There was complete panic,” he added.”
A couple of days later the BBC News website published a filmed report featuring the same doctor and titled “Watch: UK surgeon shares footage from Gaza hospital after deadly Israeli strike”.
“A British doctor has shared footage with the BBC from inside the European Gaza Hospital near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, moments after a deadly Israeli air strike.
Dr Tom Potokar, a consultant plastic surgeon who has been to Gaza 16 times to treat patients, was at the hospital when warplanes dropped six bombs, killing 28 people and injuring dozens.
Israel says it was a precise strike on Hamas. The hospital has since been evacuated.”
In neither of those reports are BBC audiences told that the featured doctor was until less than a year ago Chief Surgeon at the International Committee of the Red Cross – the organisation which has not visited any of the Israeli or foreign national hostages held in the Gaza Strip in over nineteen months, – or of his record of volunteering with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the anti-Israel NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP).
Abualouf and Comerford also tell their readers that:
“A freelance journalist working for the BBC in Gaza was among those injured in the air strike, and is now in a stable condition after receiving medical attention.”
That anonymous freelance journalist also appeared in another report relating to the same story – “Scared and malnourished – footage from Gaza shows plight of children and aftermath of Israeli strike” – which was published on May 14th and is credited to another BBC journalist who is not located in the Gaza Strip – Fergal Keane – and was previously discussed in part here.
Both those written reports uncritically amplify redundant Hamas denials concerning its well documented exploitation of hospitals for the purpose of terrorist activities:
Abualouf and Comerford: “In a joint statement the IDF and the Israeli Securities Authority (ISA) said Hamas “continues” to use hospitals in Gaza for its activities – a long-standing Israeli allegation which the group denies.”
Keane: “The Israelis say the leader of Hamas was hiding in a command-and-control compound under the hospital. The army said it conducted a “precise strike” – and blamed Hamas for “cynically and cruelly exploiting the civilian population in and around the hospital”. Hamas denies such charges.”
Another report pertaining to the same story was published by BBC Verify on May 14th under the headline “Israeli ‘bunker buster’ bombs used in Gaza hospital strike, experts say”.
“An Israeli air strike on the European Hospital in Gaza has killed 28 people and injured dozens, according to the Hamas-run civil defence agency.
The Israeli army says it was targeting Hamas fighters and infrastructure.
CCTV footage obtained and verified by the BBC shows the moment before impact and the immediate aftermath. Munitions experts told BBC Verify that the strikes and destruction are consistent with the use of so-called “bunker buster” bombs – designed to hit underground targets.
BBC Verify’s Merlyn Thomas has more.
Produced by Aisha Sembhi. Verification by Paul Brown, Shayan Sardarizadeh, Sherie Ryder and Benedict Garman. Graphics by Mark Edwards.”
In that filmed report Merlyn Thomas tells BBC audiences that: [emphasis in italics in the original]
Thomas: “But Israel has said it was targeting what it called underground terrorist infrastructure at the hospital site but didn’t provide evidence of this. It did however release this video claiming to show the European hospital. But it doesn’t. We verified it’s actually a school located a few hundred metres away.”
The evening before the appearance of this BBC Verify report the Times of Israel had already reported on that video as follows:
“The Israel Defense Forces, which did not confirm if Sinwar was killed, said in a statement that it had targeted Hamas operatives at an underground command center belonging to the terror group, below the European Hospital in Khan Younis. The military also released footage from the aftermath of the strike. The video purported to show that the IDF strike had uncovered the tunnel under the hospital, though the footage showed an adjacent school and not the medical center.
Footage posted online showed several large plumes of smoke rising from the ground around the hospital, as Israeli Air Force fighter jets dropped dozens of heavy bombs. Other clips showed that the ground had collapsed in the area of the strike.”
As clarified by Middle East Buka and others, the school – marked in purple in the image below – is located next to the European hospital compound.
As explained by military correspondent Doron Kadosh:
“The attack was carried out in a similar manner to the one in which Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated in Dahiyya in Beirut: an attack on all entrances and exits at the entrances to the underground compound, with the aim of preventing escape after the attack, should Sinwar manage to escape.”
In other words, the fact that the video showed a school adjacent to the European hospital does not negate the existence of “underground terrorist infrastructure at the hospital site” as Thomas implies.
Moreover, Thomas apparently considered it appropriate to end BBC Verify’s report with a gratuitous reference to “genocide”:
Thomas: “All of this comes as the UN’s head of humanitarian affairs has urged world leaders to – in his words – prevent genocide in Gaza.”
Notably, BBC Verify made no effort to inform BBC audiences that Tom Fletcher’s reference to ‘genocide’ came in a speech in which he also noted that – as the BBC has known for over a year – the ICJ has not issued a ruling on that issue to date.
With the outcome of the strikes being unclear at the time, the BBC’s funding public may well find it difficult to understand exactly what BBC Verify was claiming to verify in this nearly two-and-a-half-minute report. A munitions expert’s claim that ‘bunker buster’ bombs had been used to carry out the strikes may seem rather obvious to anyone viewing the footage, Thomas’ ‘gotcha’ revelation about a caption error on a video had already been reported by the Israeli English language media and, like her colleagues, she had nothing of any significance to tell her viewers about the alleged target of the strike, Mohammed Sinwar.
The efforts of the seven members of BBC Verify staff involved in making this report would obviously have better served the interests of licence fee payers trying to understand this story and others had they instead been focused on providing factual information about the long-known exploitation of medical facilities by Hamas and other Gaza Strip based terrorist organisations.
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