Throughout the first eleven days of Operation Roaring Lion, visitors to the BBC News website saw the grand total of two stand-alone reports relating to the topic of Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Israel.
Both those reports related to the same incident on the second day of the war, when an Iranian missile killed nine civilians and injured over 40 in Beit Shemesh:
“BBC reports from Beit Shemesh after deadly Iranian missile strike” Hugo Bachega, 1/3/26
“Nine dead in missile attack on Israel as Iran strikes region” Hugo Bachega and Robert Greenall, 2/3/26
“In a post on X, the Israel Defense Forces accused Iran of directly firing missiles toward Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, “killing innocent civilians”. Officials say a synagogue where people were sheltering from the air raids was hit.
The building was completely destroyed – dozens of rescuers were at the scene of the attack searching for people feared to be under the rubble.”
Since the appearance of those two reports, the BBC News website has not published any additional dedicated reporting on the topic of specific missile attacks from Iran.
Any reporting on that topic that has appeared was to be found on a series of live pages.
For example, on the afternoon of March 2nd an Iranian ballistic missile hit a residential area in the southern city of Be’er Sheva, injuring tens of civilians. As was later reported by the Jerusalem Post, 198 apartments in the area had to be declared uninhabitable – including all of those in two multi-storey buildings – and 1,083 people found themselves homeless as a result.
Visitors to the BBC News website found no stand-alone reporting on that story and even the live page that was active on that day did not include any mention of that attack.
On March 8th at least six people were injured at different locations in central Israel as a result of attacks by Iranian ballistic missiles with cluster bomb warheads. No stand-alone reporting on those attacks appeared on the BBC News website. The only relevant entry on the live page that was active on that day was the following:
On March 9th one person was killed at a construction site in central Israel in an Iranian ballistic missile attack with cluster bomb warheads. Another man later succumbed to injuries sustained in that attack. Once again those visiting the BBC News website did not find any stand-alone reporting on that topic. The live page which was active on that day included the following entries:
Many people would of course regard the killings of a grandfather of four and a father of three as “significant damage”.
Late on March 9th the BBC News website published a report by David Gritten headlined “Strikes shake Iran cities as crowds rally in support of Mojtaba Khamenei”. From paragraph 32 onwards, BBC audiences find the following: [emphasis added]
“On Monday, authorities in Israel reported the first deadly strike there in just over a week.
A worker from China was killed and another was seriously injured by shrapnel from a missile with a cluster bomb warhead at a construction site in Yehud, local media reported.
A third person was injured elsewhere as at least six locations in central Israel were reportedly hit by cluster bombs from the same missile.
Footage shared on social media in recent days has shown the use of such warheads, which break up into smaller bombs, making them difficult for air defences to intercept as they scatter over a wide area.”
CAMERA UK has submitted a complaint to the BBC requesting a correction to the inaccurate claim that the Israeli victims of that attack – both residents of Petah Tikva – were “from China”.
According to IDF assessments, around half of some 300 ballistic missiles launched at Israel by Iran since February 28th were armed with cluster bomb warheads. As explained at Ynet:
“Cluster munitions are weapons designed to increase the destructive impact and the fear caused by conventional arms.
Instead of carrying a single large warhead that creates concentrated destruction at the point of impact, cluster munitions contain dozens or even hundreds of smaller explosives. These submunitions spread over a wide area, expanding the damage zone, increasing the number of potential casualties and complicating rescue and recovery efforts.”
Remarkably, the BBC News website – which in the past has reported extensively on the use of cluster bombs in the Ukraine-Russia war and elsewhere – has shown little interest in reporting on Iran’s use (not for the first time) of those munitions in its latest attacks on Israeli residential areas. In addition to the brief mention in Gritten’s above article, BBC audiences find the following one-sentence mention of the topic in a recently updated report:
“Israel accused Iran of launching cluster bomb missile strikes on the country, which has killed two people since Monday. A missile attack on 1 March in the city of Beit Shemesh killed at least nine people and injured 27 others, according to emergency services.”
As we know, throughout the past two-and-a-half years the BBC has regularly complained that it could not report from the Gaza Strip due to the restrictions on the entry of foreign journalists. In contrast, the BBC has several members of staff permanently based in Israel (at least one of whom is aware of Iran’s use of cluster munitions – see from 2:46:45), while others regularly arrive in the country to augment its Jerusalem bureau’s reporting.
That of course makes the relatively small volume of BBC News website reporting from the sites of Iranian (and Hizballah) attacks on Israel all the more remarkable, especially when compared to the corporation’s generous coverage of the situation of civilians in Lebanon, Iran and Gulf states.
