On the evening of November 18th the IDF carried out a strike against a target near Sidon in Lebanon. Just over a couple of hours later, the BBC News website published a report which, due to its hasty appearance, fails to tell BBC audiences the whole story.
Headlined “Lebanon says Israeli strike killed 13 people near Palestinian refugee camp” and credited to Sam Hancock and Hugo Bachega, that report opens as follows:
“At least 13 people have been killed in an Israeli strike near a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, the country’s health ministry says.
The Israeli military said it had targeted members of the Palestinian armed group Hamas “operating in a training compound… in the Ein el-Hilweh area”.
It said the location was used by Hamas to plan and carry out attacks against Israel, which Hamas rejected as “fabrication and lies”.”
As in previous BBC reporting about Ein al-Hilweh (also Ain el-Hilweh), BBC audiences are not informed why Palestinian refugee camps still exist in Lebanon. Later in the report, readers find the following:
“Images showed emergency workers at the entrance of Ein el-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.
Footage online also showed ambulances rushing through the narrow streets of the crowded camp as a huge plume of smoke billowed from the location hit.
Initial reports said the strike hit an area outside a mosque that is usually busy at night.
Condemning the attack, Hamas said it had “no military installations in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon” and that the site targeted was an “open sports field”.”
Despite their uncritical promotion of Hamas’ claim that it has “no military installations in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon”, Hancock and Bachega fail to inform BBC audiences that the Lebanese Authorities had reported the handover of five truckloads of weapons in the Ein el Hilweh camp alone in September.
On the morning after the strike, the IDF’s Arabic language spokesman published evidence of the targeted site’s use by Hamas in the form of a 2023 recruitment flyer.
Pictures later emerged of some of those featured in Hamas’ mourning notice wearing Hamas headbands and Hamas flags and posters were on display at their funerals. The IDF subsequently announced that one of those killed in the strike was a Hamas operative called Jawad Sidawi who was involved in plotting attacks against Israel from Lebanon.
All that relevant information is of course absent from the BBC’s article because, as has been the case in the past, it rushed to put out a report before the full details of the story were available. Notably, the BBC’s editorial guidelines on accuracy include the following:
“3.4.2 In news and current affairs content, achieving due accuracy is more important than speed.”
However, based on past experience, it is highly unlikely that the BBC will update this unhelpful report in order to ensure that its audiences – including future readers of its online archive – are given the full range of information needed to properly understand this story and its wider implications.
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