On May 29, Middle East Correspondent Emir Nader published an article to the BBC Website titled “Israel put on UN sexual violence in warzones blacklist for the first time”.
Throughout the article, Nader relies on unproven allegations, unverified evidence and even the absence of Israeli guilty verdicts against abuse suspects to prove the state’s wrongdoing. This creates an unfalsifiable system, where any source is reliable and any allegation is proof in and of itself.
Nader reports:
“A report by the office of Secretary General António Guterres said the UN had last year verified 31 cases of sexual violence perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. It said 13 of the cases had occurred in 2025, and 18 in the two years prior.
The UN said its report should be seen as “indicative of incidents and patterns” rather than comprehensive.”
So, this entire news story is – by Nader’s own admission – based on thirteen allegations, with additional allegations from previous years (outside of the reporting period) used to bump up the numbers. Those thirteen allegations are framed as evidence of a pattern of behaviour, without any concrete evidence at all.
Nader reports that the UN has verified these thirteen allegations. However, the author of the report, Pramilla Patten, UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, made it clear in her May 29 press conference that she had not personally seen any of the evidence and:
“It is not the responsibility of my office to do any verification”
Given that at least one of the “verified” incidents was listed as having occurred at “an unidentified base”, and that the UN Special Representative refused to “visit any detention facilities even if Israel offered”, surely the BBC should be asking robust questions about the sourcing of such “verification”.
Unfortunately, Nader asks none. Instead, he goes on to report that:
“The UN said its attempts to fully investigate the issue had been obstructed by the Israeli government and threats made against detainees to prevent abuse being reported.”
This relates to the claim within the report that the numbers of allegations are low because:
“Challenges to reporting sexual violence persisted, due to, inter alia, explicit threats made by Israeli armed and security forces coercing detainees not to report abuse.”
In other words, the UN created an unfalsifiable system where an absence of allegations is evidence of wrongdoing. Still, Nader fails to interrogate the claim.
He leans into this further by appealing to the 2025 report by AOAV (Action on Armed Violence):
“Throughout the war in Gaza, a number of human rights organisations have criticised a lack of accountability and apparent impunity for abuses committed by Israeli troops.
Last year, the research organisation Action on Armed Violence said nearly nine in 10 Israeli investigations into crimes committed by soldiers since the beginning of the Gaza war had been closed without finding fault or without resolution. Out of 52 cases studied, it said only one case resulted in a prison conviction.”
The report in question lists amongst its 52 cases of evidence of “impunity for abuses” the Al-Ahli hospital blast proven to have been caused by a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket, tragic cases of friendly fire, and the death of over 100 Palestinians in a stampede for aid in February 2024. In fact, the AOAV report explicitly argues that any case that does not immediately result in a criminal conviction is evidence of a culture of impunity, even where cases are disproven or ongoing.
This new unfalsifiable system of blame replaces an older system, based on the 2007 paper by Tal Nitzan that claimed that the reason there was no evidence of systemic military rape of Palestinians by the IDF was because Israeli soldiers were too racist to rape Palestinian women and to do so would humanise them:
“In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences – just as organized military rape would have done.”
Essentially, the previous argument was that in Israel, not raping was itself abuse, whereas the new argument is that no evidence of guilt is merely evidence of impunity.
The BBC has very clear guidelines for impartiality, demanding a much higher level of scrutiny of sources that seems to have been applied in its article on the UN report. For example guideline 2.4.22 states:
“The BBC’s journalism should scrutinise arguments, question consensus and hold power to account with consistency and due impartiality.”
The power of the UN and its arguments do not seem to qualify for this scrutiny. Additionally, BBC principle 3.2.2 says:
“All BBC output, as appropriate to its subject and nature, must be well sourced, based on sound evidence, and where possible corroborated”
However, in the case of Israel, we are seeing a process develop by which allegations are evidence. In this unfalsifiable system of accusation promoted by NGO’s and the UN, and reported uncritically by outlets like the BBC, there isn’t even a possibility that charges will be framed as false, because even not-guilty verdicts against Israeli suspects are considered evidence of guilt.
The BBC should adhere to it’s own guidelines in respect of all brokers of power, regardless of their status as NGO’s or humanitarian organisations. Impartiality means to scrutinise without fear or favour.
The BBC has once again failed to do so.
