On the afternoon of October 30th the BBC News website published a report by David Gritten under the headline “Gaza: Hamas hands Red Cross coffins it says contains two hostages’ bodies”. That report was subsequently updated to report the arrival of the two coffins in Israel and in the early hours (local time) of the following day, after the completion of the identification process, its headline was changed to read “Israel confirms identities of hostages’ bodies returned by Hamas”.
The opening sentences of that third version of the report read as follows:
“Israel has confirmed the identities of two deceased hostages that it received from Hamas via the Red Cross in Gaza.
The bodies were identified as those of Amiram Cooper and Sahar Baruch the Israeli prime minister’s office said on Thursday. Hamas had earlier said it recovered their bodies.
“The Government of Israel shares in the deep sorrow of the Cooper and Sahar families and all the families of the fallen hostages,” it said in a statement.” [emphasis added]
CAMERA UK submitted a complaint to the BBC on the morning of October 31st in which we explained that Sahar is the first name of the deceased hostage and the name of the family is Baruch. We provided the BBC with a link to a Hebrew language announcement put out by the Israeli prime minister’s office on social media.
Just over two hours after our complaint was submitted, the report was amended to read:
“Israel has confirmed the identities of two deceased hostages whose bodies it received from Hamas via the Red Cross in Gaza on Thursday.
Forensic tests showed the remains were those of Amiram Cooper, 84, and Sahar Baruch, 25, the Israeli prime minister’s office said.
“The government of Israel shares in the deep sorrow of the Cooper and [Baruch] families and all the families of the fallen hostages,” it said in a statement.”
Several hours later we received a response from the BBC News website which included the following:
“We first published news about this at 1536 hours on 30 October when news broke that two hostages’ bodies had been handed to the Red Cross.
This was a developing story and as is customary with news stories, we updated it several times during the course of the evening and the following morning.
Later, the Israeli government released a statement so we added this into our story, reporting: “The Government of Israel shares in the deep sorrow of the Cooper and Sahar families and all the families of the fallen hostages,” it said in a statement.
This was a direct quote from an announcement made by the Israeli Prime Minister’s office –https://www.gov.il/en/pages/spoke-ip301025
The government statement read:
“Following the completion of the identification process by the National Center of Forensic Medicine, in cooperation with the Israel Police and the IDF Rabbinate, IDF representatives informed the families of fallen hostages Amiram Cooper and Sahar Baruch, of blessed memory, that their loved ones have been returned to Israel and that their identification has been completed.
The Government of Israel shares in the deep sorrow of the Cooper and Sahar families and all the families of the fallen hostages.”
However, as you pointed out i [sic] your message, the family name was not Sahar but Baruch.
We amended our story again with a news update – correcting a mistake which had initially been made by the Israeli prime minister’s office – so that the sentence in our report now reads:
“The government of Israel shares in the deep sorrow of the Cooper and [Baruch] families and all the families of the fallen hostages,” it said in a statement.
We are grateful to you for writing in to us about this.”
While the PMO announcement in English did indeed err with regard to the family’s name, clearly no fact checking was done by the BBC News website’s journalists or editors before that statement was quoted in David Gritten’s report.
BBC staffers do not read Hebrew – ask Yolande Knell their corespondent based in Jerusalem – she knows and reads and understands Arabic and English only!
Why would they bother to get Israeli or jewish names right? Very often they can’t even get the names of Israeli towns and cities right, or they put them in the wrong area, or give them an Arabic name. Yet they are very careful to get Turkey’s new name correctly spelled and pronounced. The same with anywhere else in the world.