Over a year ago we discussed a BBC News website report about an early morning strike on the former al Taba’een school compound in the Daraj district of Gaza City on August 10th 2024.
THE SOURCES BEHIND ANOTHER BBC “TARGETING SCHOOLS” REPORT
As we documented, its early versions quoted different Hamas-linked sources providing varying casualty numbers.
The final version of that report was retitled “Israeli strike in Gaza kills more than 70, hospital head says” and credited to Barbara Plett Usher in Jerusalem and Thomas Mackintosh in London, with “Additional reporting by Rushdi Abualouf, Gaza correspondent located in Istanbul, Turkey”.
As we noted at the time:
“That version of the report quotes a different source on the topic of casualty figures – as ever without distinction between civilians and combatants and without any independent BBC verification – and continues to amplify Hamas propaganda:
“An Israeli air strike on a school building sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City has killed more than 70 people, the director of a hospital has told the BBC.
Fadl Naeem, head of al-Ahli Hospital where many of the casualties were taken, said those were the victims who had been identified so far, with the remains of many others so badly disfigured that identification was difficult.
An Israeli military spokesman said al-Taba’een school “served as an active Hamas and Islamic Jihad military facility”, which Hamas denies.”
Our colleagues at CAMERA Arabic noticed that the final paragraph of that report quoted a statement put out by Hamas ministry of health at 13:37 local time on August 10th:
“More than 39,790 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli campaign, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.”
However, BBC audiences were not informed that the same Hamas announcement also stated that in the 24 hours prior to its publication – which included the time of the strike on the former school – forty people had been killed.
CAMERA Arabic therefore sent a complaint to the BBC on August 13th 2024 which included the following:
“However, the article omitted another part of the same [press] release, concerning only the death toll of the 24 hours prior to its publication:
“Israeli occupation carried out three massacres against families, [with] “40 martyrs and 140 injured arriving from them to the hospitals during the last 24 hours”
This number is inconsistent with the article’s leading quote (also in the headline), by al-Ahli hospital head Fadl Naeem, who told the BBC over an hour before the MoH [press] release (bit.ly/46FUjyl, and also see his 12:22 PM Aljazeera interview on t.ly/dfEEh) that just his own hospital was able to identify 70 bodies coming from the al-Taba’een attack alone.
I therefore urge the BBC to mention this inconsistency; if the Ministry of Health is good enough a source to quote regarding the total number of killed Palestinians, it should also be reliable enough to quote regarding the death toll of a specific day, especially if that number is at odds with another source featured in the same article.”
Despite the BBC’s claim that it aims to reply to Stage 1a complaints within 10 working days, CAMERA Arabic only received the corporation’s largely irrelevant reply 105 days later, on November 26th 2024. The BBC rejected the complaint, stating that “[o]verall we are satisfied that the article meets the high standards demanded by our editorial guidelines.”
CAMERA Arabic submitted a Stage 1b complaint on November 27th 2024, again noting that:
“…the [BBC] report failed to address an apparent inconsistency between the MoH numbers and significantly higher estimates the BBC had quoted from other sources. Most prominently featured was the manager of a single hospital (al-Ahli), who claimed that his facility alone saw over 70 dead, more than an hour before the MoH published its own figures.”
The Stage 1b complaint further noted that the issue at hand concerned “various Palestinian sources contradicting each other and the BBC opting not to scrutinise this”.
The BBC claims to respond to Stage 1b complaints within 20 working days. However, the corporation’s response to that second complaint arrived 196 days later, on June 10th 2025.
“We are writing to you as your complaint of 27 November 2024 has been identified as remaining open on our database. We are grateful for your further comments about the article “Israeli strike in Gaza kills more than 70, hospital head says” and are very sorry not to have provided a further response at the time.
While we note your concerns about inconsistency in figures, we have reviewed the piece and believe it has quoted the sources accurately, explained the sources of the figures to our readers, and explained that “The BBC cannot independently verify figures from either side”.
While we believe that the article meets our published standards, we note your further comments and acknowledge your strength of feeling.”
CAMERA Arabic submitted a Stage 2 complaint to the ECU (which also claims to respond within 20 working days) on June 14th 2025 and a response rejecting the complaint was received on June 30th 2025.
As we see, the process of submitting a Stage 1a and a Stage 1b complaint – which together should have taken around six weeks to complete – in this case took ten months. Once again, that raises serious questions about the standard at which the BBC Complaints procedure functions.
This story, however, also highlights another issue. For over 22 months the BBC has been telling its audiences that it has to rely on local sources for information about events in the Gaza Strip because Israel has not facilitated unsupervised entry for foreign reporters. At the same time, the BBC has uncritically quoted and promoted casualty figures provided by the Hamas-run health ministry on a daily basis and repeatedly asserted that those figures are considered reliable by the UN.
In this case, when the latter contradicted the former, the BBC chose not to inform its audiences about the lower casualty figures presented by the Hamas authorities.
