Early on the morning of June 4th the BBC put out the following social media post:
That post took members of the public to a report carrying the similarly context-free headline “Israel launches strikes on weapons in Syria” which is credited to a relatively new BBC employee called James Chater located some 14,000 kilometres away from the story in Sydney, Australia.
As is so often the case in BBC reporting, that article adopted the ‘last-first’ approach, with its opening paragraph mentioning the last in a chain of events before explaining what came before. [emphasis added]
“Israel said it had launched strikes on weapons belonging to Syria, hours after reports that two projectiles had been fired from Syria into Israel on Tuesday.”
The words “reports that” are of course completely superfluous as two rockets were indeed launched from Syria to the Golan Heights shortly before 10 p.m. on the evening of June 3rd.
Eight paragraphs later, Chater provided some additional – if economical – reporting on that incident:
“Israel said the strikes came after two projectiles launched from Syria landed in open areas of the country, causing no injuries.
Israeli media reported that the strikes were the first launched from Syria since the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
It was not immediately clear who fired the projectiles.
“We consider the president of Syria directly responsible for any threat and fire toward the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Syria’s foreign ministry said reports of the launches from inside Syria “have not been verified yet”.”
Readers were not informed that the residents of two communities – Hispin and Ramat Magshimim – had to rush for shelter during those attacks or that the “open areas” concerned were near to the latter village. Neither does Chater tell BBC audiences that, as reported by the Times of Israel:
“The IDF said it had responded to the attack from Syria with artillery fire on the source of the rockets, some 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from the border with Israel. […]
The IDF said the rockets had been launched from the area of Tasil in south Syria, near an area where gunmen had fired at Israeli troops in April.”
Readers may recall that the BBC failed to provide its audiences with the full information concerning that incident at the time:
OMISSIONS IN BBC JERUSALEM BUREAU JOURNALIST’S RECENT SYRIA REPORTS
It hence comes as no surprise to see that Chater’s report fails to tell BBC audiences that one of two groups – ‘The Martyr Muhammad al-Deif Brigades’ and ‘The Islamic Resistance front in Syria’ – which claimed responsibility (as yet unconfirmed) for the rocket launches on June 3rd was apparently the same organisation involved in that April 2nd attack.
By contrast, Chater’s reporting on the later strikes on weapons stores in Syria read as follows:
“The Israeli strikes on southern Syria caused “significant human and material losses”, Syria’s foreign ministry said, adding that Israel was “trying to destabilise the region”. […]
“Violent explosions shook southern Syria, notably the town of Quneitra and the Daraa region, following Israeli aerial strikes,” said the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group.
In a statement, Syria’s foreign ministry said: “This escalation constitutes a blatant violation of Syrian sovereignty and aggravates tensions in the region.
“Syria has never been and will never be a threat to anyone in the region.”
It was unclear how many people were killed or injured in Israel’s strikes.”
Chater also found fit to link to several items of previous BBC reporting, including in the following paragraph:
“It [Israel] has also encouraged the expansion of settlements in the occupied Golan Heights, territory which Israel seized from Syria in 1976 and is considered illegally occupied under international law.”
As was noted here when that linked article first appeared in December 2024, that “expansion of settlements” narrative is an exaggeration:
CROSS-PLATFORM BBC PROMOTION OF ‘UNNECESSARY PROVOCATION’ NARRATIVE
Israel of course did not take the Golan Heights “in 1976” as claimed by Chater but rather during the Six Day War in 1967 following Syrian attacks which predictably are not part of Chater’s account.
Notably, only last month the BBC had to correct another report which similarly misled audiences with a basic historical error.
CAMERA UK sent a complaint to the BBC on that matter and the failure to note claims of responsibility for the rocket fire. Some three hours after our complaint was submitted – and 13 hours after the report’s initial publication – it was largely re-written with its headline now stating “Israel strikes weapons in southern Syria after projectiles fired into Golan” and its opening paragraph now stating:
“The Israeli military says it launched strikes on weapons belonging to the Syrian government in southern Syria, hours after two projectiles were fired from Syria into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.”
Amendments also include the following:
“A little-known group calling itself the Martyr Mohammed Deif Brigades – a reference to Hamas’s late military chief – claimed it had fired two rockets.”
“The Martyr Mohammed Deif Brigades released a night-time video on a Telegram channel that it said showed the moment the projectiles landed, although it was not immediately possible to verify the armed group’s claim of responsibility.”
“It [Israel] also sent troops into the UN-monitored demilitarised buffer zone between the occupied Golan Heights and Syria, as well as several adjoining areas and the summit of Mount Hermon. Israel seized the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and later effectively annexed it, in a move not recognised internationally.”
However, no footnote has been added to the report to inform all those who read it during the first 13 hours after its publication that they were misled on the topic of the date of the Six Day War.
