On November 28th the BBC News website published a report by Raffi Berg about an incident that had taken place in southern Syria several hours earlier.
Headlined “Thirteen killed in deadliest Israeli raid for months in southern Syria”, that report consists mostly of accounts of the events provided by the IDF and Syrian government sources, with the latter given over twice the wordcount than the former.
“At least 13 people have been killed in an Israeli raid on a village in southern Syria overnight, state media reported, in one of the deadliest incidents of its kind for months. It said children were among the dead.
Sana news agency said residents of Beit Jinn “confronted” Israeli troops, leading to a firefight. Air strikes were also carried out. Syria’s foreign ministry condemned what it called a “war crime” by Israel.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said troops went into the village, on the edge of the occupied Golan Heights, to detain militants who it said “advanced terror attacks against Israeli civilians”.
Six Israeli soldiers were injured in the clashes, three seriously, it said.
The IDF said it targeted the Jamaa Islamiya militant group in Friday’s operation. It said that when the raid began, “several armed terrorists opened fire” on its soldiers, who fired back.”
Remarkably, Berg has nothing more to tell BBC audiences about “the Jamaa Islamiya militant group”, not least the fact that it is a Lebanon-based branch of the Muslim Brotherhood with ties to Hamas and Hizballah that participated in the war between Israel and Hizballah last year.
A Times of Israel report on the November 28th incident includes the following:
“According to the Israel Defense Forces, shortly before 3 a.m., soldiers of the 55th Reserve Paratroopers Brigade set out to the Syrian village of Beit Jinn — located some seven kilometers (4.3 miles) east of Israel’s border — to detain two members of the al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group) terror organization, acting on intelligence information collected in recent weeks indicating that they were planning attacks on Israel.
The pair are brothers, with one considered by the IDF to be the “main” suspect. The military said that the pair had previously launched rockets at Israel. […]
Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya is a Sunni faction that forms part of the broader Muslim Brotherhood political network.
The armed wing of the group, the al-Fajr Forces, established in the 1980s, repeatedly targeted Israel from Lebanon amid the war last year with Hezbollah, often working in conjunction with the Shiite Lebanese terror group.
Amid the war, the IDF said it struck members of the group as well as its infrastructure in both Lebanon and Syria.
The IDF said the group also closely cooperates with Hamas in both Lebanon and Syria, and maintains military sites in southern Lebanon and infrastructure along the Syria-Lebanon border and in the Beit Jinn area.”
Neither does Berg have anything to tell his readers about previous IDF operations in Beit Jinn, including the arrests of Hamas operatives there in June 2025. He does, however, go on to state:
“Israel regularly carries out incursions into Syrian villages, saying it acts to prevent the presence of armed groups.
Since the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad nearly a year ago, Israel has moved its forces across a buffer zone on the Golan Heights into southern Syria, where a number of anti-Israel groups and cells operate.
Israel says it will not allow the Syrian army, which it considers a threat, to deploy there.”
Once again readers are given no information about those “anti-Israel groups and cells”, despite the fact that BBC audiences are already underinformed on that topic.
Neither does Berg bother to explain to readers why Israel might consider the Syrian army “a threat”, particularly in light of both past events and recent reports concerning the allegedly growing presence of terrorist organisations in Syria, in coordination with the regime.
Berg continues:
“The buffer zone – a demilitarised stretch of land – had been a no-go area designed to keep the peace after a ceasefire ended the 1973 war between Israel and Syria. The UN has said the IDF’s deployment there was a “violation” of the agreement which it said both sides should uphold.”
However, as has been the case in previous BBC reports, he fails to clarify that the party that signed the ceasefire agreement on the Syrian side no longer exists, that during the Syrian civil war UN forces largely abandoned the demilitarised zone and redeployed to the Israeli side for several years or that both the Syrian army and assorted armed groups – one of which was Jabhat al Nusra, headed by the man who is now Syria’s president – were active in that supposedly UNDOF enforced demilitarised area.
As we see, Raffi Berg’s report on the November 28th incident in Beit Jinn fails to provide BBC audiences with the information necessary for full understanding of both that particular event and the broader topic of Israeli operations in south-west Syria.
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What on earth is going on with Raffi Berg! Has he learned nothing. And being targeted by the likes of Owen Jones. I’ve concluded that he must be another one who wants to be on the podium with far too many others striving to be seen as proud to be ashamed to be Jewish. It’s a big and troubling issue.