On the afternoon of December 26th the BBC News website published a report headlined “Two killed in suspected Palestinian ramming and knife attack in Israel”.
Credited to Raffi Berg, that report (which, in line with BBC editorial policy, only uses the words terror and terrorist in quotes from Israeli sources) was updated five times in the twelve hours after its initial publication, as more information became available. However, the word “suspected” was not removed from the headline even after it became clear that the multiple incidents at three locations were terror attacks.
The version currently available online opens with the following description of the events:
“Two people have been killed in what police say was a “rolling terror attack” in northern Israel.
Police said the attacker ran over a pedestrian in the eastern city of Beit Shean, then drove on before stabbing a woman near Ein Harod, about 8 miles (12.5km) to the west. The suspect was eventually shot and wounded by a civilian outside the city of Afula, according to police.
Shimshon Mordechai, a 68-year-old man, was killed and a 16-year-old boy was hurt in Friday’s ramming, officials said, while the stabbing victim was Aviv Maor, aged 18.”
The BBC’s report does not tell readers that an additional person was injured when attacked by the same terrorist near Afula.
“A 37-year-old man was also reported wounded outside of Afula when he was run over, before the terrorist was neutralized. He was brought to the hospital moderately wounded.
“The terrorist missed him and ran into an electric pole,” a witness to the attack outside Afula described to i24news. “He got out of the vehicle, picked up a huge rock, and brought it down on his head….”
The latest version of the BBC’s report does not inform readers that the perpetrator was identified as Ahmed al-Rub, aged 37, from Qabatiya even though that information was already in the public domain hours earlier.
Some four hours after the report originally appeared, the following paragraphs were added:
“A day before the attack, an Israeli reservist was fired after video emerged of him ramming a praying Palestinian with a quad bike. […]
The incident comes a day after the army reservist drove a quad bike into a Palestinian man who was praying on a roadside in the West Bank.
Video shows the man, dressed in civilian clothes but with a firearm, ramming the victim with the vehicle. Reports say the victim was unhurt.
The Israeli military said the soldier – who had earlier opened fire in a nearby village – had been fired and his weapon confiscated.”
At the bottom of that version of the report, readers find another new insertion: “Additional reporting by Tom McArthur”.
Interestingly, while Tom McArthur and Raffi Berg apparently found it necessary to ‘balance’ a report about a fatal, multi-scene terror attack in Israel by devoting four of the report’s total of fifteen paragraphs to an incident that had taken place the previous day near Ramallah, BBC audiences were not told about a vehicular attack on December 26th in which four Israeli soldiers were injured.
Moreover, the report closes by telling readers that:
“Attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians have surged in the West Bank in recent years, according to the United Nations, with more than a thousand killed since the Hamas attacks on Israel of 7 October 2023 in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 abducted into Gaza.
More than 70,600 people have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.”
The phrasing of that first paragraph clearly misleads readers by suggesting that “Israeli settlers” are responsible for the deaths of “more than a thousand” Palestinians in the past 26 months. In fact, the vast majority were gunmen killed in exchanges of fire with Israeli security forces, rioters who clashed with troops or terrorists carrying out attacks.
Readers are told nothing about the rise in terrorism in the area that the BBC chooses to call the West Bank in recent years or the numbers of Israelis killed in that region. The INSS recorded 11,219 terror attacks between 7/10/2023 and 25/12/2025 as well as 2,317 attacks thwarted in 2024 and 2025. 77 Israelis (45 civilians and 32 members of the security forces) were killed during that time.
Similarly, although this report’s final line uses allegedly up-to-date casualty figures supplied by the terrorist organisation that began the war, the BBC once again has nothing to tell its audiences about the number of Israeli casualties in the Gaza Strip since October 7th 2023.
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Time to close the doors of this racist anti-British anti-Brexit pro Islamic organisation #defundthebbc