BBC News frames the killing of an Israeli family as ‘victory’ for Iran

Not long after 6 p.m. local time on April 5^th, a ballistic missile launched by the Iranian regime hit a residential building in Haifa. Around an hour later, an entry on the BBC News website live page that was active at the time informed readers that four people had been injured in that attack but did not clarify the party responsible.

At around 8 p.m. it became clear that some residents of the building were missing, believed to be trapped under the rubble. Efforts to rescue four missing people continued throughout the night, complicated by the assessment that the missile’s warhead had not exploded.

Early on the morning of April 6^th two bodies were recovered from the rubble and Haifa once again came under attack from Iran, with four additional people injured. Visitors to a newly opened BBC News website live page on that morning found the following entries, the first of which also fails to report the source of the missile attack.

In the early afternoon a third body was recovered from the rubble of the building, followed by the fourth. The BBC News website live page was updated with an entry from the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Lucy Williamson.

A link to that entry was included in a later one on the same live page.

On the evening of April 6^th, the first of the four victims of the Iranian regime’s attack was named as 68-year-old voice coach Lena Ostrovsky. Around an hour-and-a-half later, the other three victims were identified as her 73-year-old husband Vladimir Gershovitz (who had been released from hospital just hours before the missile attack), her son Dima and her daughter-in-law Lucille Jane.

The BBC News website did not publish the names of the four victims or report the fact that an entire family had been killed in that attack on a civilian residential building. An article by Robert Greenall and Toby Mann published on that evening includes a photograph of the site but both the caption and the text only tell BBC audiences about the four people injured in the attack. 

The only stand-alone reporting on that missile attack to be found on the BBC News website is a 28-second-long filmed report by Lucy Williamson titled “‘Daily gamble of Russian roulette’: BBC at site of Iran strike on Haifa”. A link purporting to provide BBC audiences with “more on this story” in fact leads to an unrelated ten-month-old filmed report.

In her report, Williamson portrays an attack targeting a residential building in which four civilians were killed and four injured – including a baby – as “victory” for Iran.

Williamson: “We’ve just seen rescue teams bring out four body bags from the rubble behind me. One of the residents here who was watching with us said living here felt like a daily gamble of Russian roulette. Israel has been talking up its success in hitting Iran’s ballistic missile sites and its leadership but weeks into this war, Iran is still firing, still hitting targets in Israel, and that – for Iran – is victory.”

We have previously documented the paucity of BBC reporting from the sites of the hundreds of missile attacks on civilian targets launched by the Iranian regime or its proxies, despite the fact that the corporation has a permanent bureau in Jerusalem.

In this case we see that even when a BBC correspondent did make the trip to one of the impact sites, her reporting provided next to no information about the story itself or the victims of the attack. Viewers saw no mention of “war crimes” or “international law” as is so often the case in BBC reporting from other locations. Instead, Lucy Williamson chose to focus on the promotion of decidedly questionable framing of the issue of indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilians.

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