At the beginning of August 2024, CAMERA UK complained to the BBC about four items that were part of BBC coverage of the Hizballah attack on Majdal Shams days earlier. In those four items, the twelve victims aged 10 to 16 were described as “young adults” or using misleading language such as “including children” or “mostly children”.
On August 11th 2024 we were informed that it would take the BBC more time to address our complaint and on September 1st 2024 we were told that the time frame for doing so had expired.
Nearly fourteen months after that complaint was made, on September 30th 2025, we received a response from the BBC which includes the following:
“You wrote to us in August 2024 with reference to our article: What is Hezbollah and why has it been fighting Israel in Lebanon? – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67307858
You cited a sentence in it which said: Israel has accused Hezbollah of carrying out a rocket attack which killed 12 children and young adults in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
You said all the victims, once identified, turned out to be aged between 10 and 16 and you suggested the sentence should be amended to remove the words “young adult”.
The explainer on Hezbollah has since been updated and the passage about the missile attack on Majdal Shams has been removed, along with the sentence in question.”
That ‘explainer’ was in fact only amended on August 28th 2024, meaning that for a whole month after the attack on Majdal Shams, readers were still being misled by the claim that “young adults” were among the victims.
The BBC’s response continues: [emphasis added]
“You cited other reports we published from the time of the strike in which we used the phrases “young adult” or “mostly children”.
The strike happened on 27 July and for some time after that, the ages of two of the people killed were not known. It was not known that they were both under the age of 18.”
“Some time after that” was in fact around 24 hours. The attack on Majdal Shams took place in the early evening on Saturday, July 27th 2024. By the following evening, all twelve victims had been identified and the funerals of all but one had already taken place.
The BBC’s response goes on: [emphasis added]
“As Paul Adams said in the first report on the strike: Israel’s foreign ministry released the identities of 10 children killed in Saturday’s strike, saying they were aged between 10 and 16. An eleventh person was named but no age was given. Details of the twelfth casualty were not confirmed.
We therefore widened the age category.
Please note that once the ages of all the victims had been announced, on 28 July, we changed the term “young adults” to “young people”.
For example, this 28 July report – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c29dwgp3rr7o– says: Thousands of people gathered on Sunday for the funerals of children and young people killed in a rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, as world leaders scrambled to contain the attack’s political fallout.
This 29 July report – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c29dwgp3rr7o – says: On the evening of Saturday 27 July, a blast hit a playing field in the town of Majdal Shams, killing 12 children and young people from the minority Druze community.
We believe that “young people” is a duly accurate term for 16-year-olds and indicated to readers that those victims were at the upper end of the age range for childhood.”
As the URL shows, the “28 July report” and the “29 July report” cited in the BBC’s response are in fact the same item – a report by Raffi Berg. However, that item was not among the ones cited in CAMERA UK’s complaint.
The three “other reports” we did complain about have not been amended and still remain online in their original form:
“Israel hits Hezbollah targets after football pitch strike kills 12 young people”
“Lebanon fears new phase in Hezbollah-Israel fighting”
“‘There was a siren, but no-one had time to react’”
In other words, not only did it take the BBC nearly fourteen months to respond to this complaint, but when it finally did so, it failed to address three out of the four items that were its topic.
CAMERA UK has submitted a follow-up complaint.
Related Articles:
REVIEWING BBC COVERAGE OF THE HIZBALLAH ATTACK ON MAJDAL SHAMS – PART TWO
BBC VERIFY MISINFORMATION ON LOCATION OF ISRAELI TOWN CORRECTED
Well they are a complete embarrassment to any British citizen, the BBC have their own biased anti British pro Islamic anti Jewish anti Christian, pro WEF agenda, but they will not be getting any more blood money from me #defundthebbc