BBC Jerusalem bureau platforms inadequately presented NGO

Following a rainy weekend in the eastern Mediterranean, on November 15^th the Israeli website Ynet reported on an opportunistic Hamas PR campaign.

“Gaza has been hit by severe storms, heavy rains and flooding over the past 24 hours, with refugee camps turning into what some residents are calling “mud pools.” The images — soaked tents, children standing knee-deep in water and families without shelter — are being widely circulated on social media and used by Hamas terrorists to launch a new international pressure campaign against Israel.

In a series of coordinated statements issued by Hamas, its so-called government media office and the civil defense authorities in Gaza, the narrative is clear: Gaza is collapsing under extreme weather, Israel is deliberately blocking humanitarian aid and the international community must intervene immediately. The campaign has been titled “Gaza Is Sinking.””

Three days later, early on the morning of November 18^th, visitors to the BBC News website’s home page, main ‘News’ page and ‘Middle East’ pages found a report credited to Yolande Knell and Wahiba Ahmed titled “Shelters plea for Gazans as winter rains raise fears of more disease and death”.

The report opens by telling readers that:

“Aid agencies have reiterated calls for Israel to allow more tents and urgently needed supplies into Gaza after the first heavy winter rainfall, saying more than a quarter of a million families need emergency help with shelters.”

In fact, a representative of just one aid agency is quoted throughout the report.

‘”We are going to lose lives this winter. Children, families will perish,” says Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

“It’s actually so frustrating that we’ve now lost so many crucial weeks since the adoption of the Trump peace plan, which said humanitarian aid would flow and the Palestinians would not needlessly continue to suffer.”’

As is all too often the case in BBC reporting, Knell and Ahmed ignore the corporation’s editorial guidelines concerning ‘Contributors’ Affiliations’, failing to provide readers with any background information about the “affiliations, funding or particular viewpoints” of the partly UK funded Norwegian Refugee Council or its representative Jan Egeland.

Following two of the report’s four vox-pop interviews carried out by an unnamed “BBC freelance journalist”, Knell and Ahmed return to presentation of the NRC’s view:

“According to the NRC – which has long led the so-called Shelter Cluster in Gaza, made up of some 20 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – about 260,000 Palestinian families, or about 1.5 million people, are in need of emergency shelter assistance, lacking the basics to get through winter.

The NGOs say they have been able to get only about 19,000 tents into Gaza since the US-brokered Israel-Hamas ceasefire took effect on 10 October.”

Interestingly, on that very date – October 10^th – COGAT reported that some 90,000 tents and tarpaulins had already entered the Gaza Strip.

The report continues with more messaging from the NRC:

“They say they have 44,000 pallets of aid – containing non-food items, including tents and bedding – blocked from entering. Supplies that have been bought are currently stuck in Egypt, Jordan and Israel.

Jan Egeland blames what he calls “a bureaucratic, military, politicised quagmire” running “counter to all humanitarian principles” for the hold-up.

In March, Israel introduced a new registration process for aid groups working in Gaza, citing security reasons. It requires that they give lists of their local Palestinian staff.

However, aid groups say that data protection laws in donor countries prevent them from handing over such information.”

Knell and Ahmed have nothing to tell their readers about the relevant topic of the infiltration of aid groups and NGOs by terrorist organisations or the fact that COGAT had already explained the reasoning behind that registration process three months ago:

“COGAT says the mechanism is a security screening intended to ensure aid goes directly to the population rather than to the Palestinian militant group Hamas.”

Readers are then told that:

“Many items, including tent poles, are also classed as “dual-use” by Israel, meaning they have a military as well as civilian purpose, and their entry is banned or heavily restricted.”

That claim concerning tent poles had already been refuted by COGAT in January 2024 and the Palestine Shelter Cluster provides advice:

The BBC’s report goes on to include a response from COGAT, quoting parts of a social media post from November 16^th:

“Cogat, the Israeli defence body that controls the border crossings, told the BBC that “over the last few months” it had coordinated the entry of “close to 190,000 tents and tarpaulins directly to the residents of the Gaza Strip”.

It said that “in accordance with the terms of the agreement” of the ceasefire, it was allowing “hundreds of trucks carrying food, water, fuel, gas, medicines, medical equipment, tents, and shelter supplies [to] enter the Gaza Strip every day, in coordination with the UN, international organizations, donor countries, and the private sector”.

On Sunday, Cogat wrote on X: “We call on international organizations to coordinate more tents and tarpaulins and other winter humanitarian responses.”

It said it was working with the new US-led Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) that had been set up in southern Israel and other international partners to plan “a catered humanitarian response for the upcoming winter”.”

After another quote from Jan Egeland, readers are told that:

“Palestinians have told the BBC that many tents – brought in by international agencies and Gulf donors – have been stolen and are available on the black market in Gaza.

They say that with a small increase in supply, prices have dropped from about $2,700 (2,330 euros; £2,050) before the ceasefire, to around $900-$1,000.

There are pleas for international help to distribute more shelters, more fairly.”

BBC audiences are not told who has been stealing and selling the tents donated free of charge by third parties and neither does the BBC’s report include any mention of recent reports concerning a “tent tax” imposed by Hamas.

Those obviously relevant aspects of the story of shelters in the Gaza Strip apparently did not awaken the journalistic curiosity of Knell and Ahmed, who instead preferred to provide an uncritical platform for messaging from the Norwegian Refugee Council which, coincidentally or not, aligns with a Hamas PR campaign.