The BBC has a long and inglorious history of having to apologize for anti-Israel reporting and Tuesday was just the latest installment.
This time, on Christmas Eve, a BBC radio report repeated the Hamas claim that the Israeli Army was conducting summary executions in Gaza. Over two weeks later, the network that many love to hail as the gold standard in reporting objectivity wrote on its Corrections and Clarifications website:
In overnight output we ran a story about Hamas accusing the Israeli army of carrying out summary executions in the Gaza strip. This was a Hamas statement, but although the accusations were attributed and our story contained a response from the Israeli military saying they were unaware of the incident and that Hamas was a terrorist organisation that did not value truth, we had not made sufficient effort to seek corroborating evidence to justify reporting the Hamas claim. We apologise for this mistake.
It is not the first or even the second time that the BBC has had to issue a correction during the war. The network previously apologized for claiming that Israel was targeting medical personnel and Arab speakers at the Al-Shifa Hospital. They also had to do damage control when a reporter claimed it was “hard to see what else… other than an Israeli airstrike” could’ve hit Al-Ahli Arab Hospital.
The BBC’s history of anti-Israel bias and subsequent corrections and apologies also predates the war. For example, anchor Anjana Gadgil declared earlier in 2023 that the IDF is “happy to kill children.”
After the Al-Shifa apology, the BBC noted that “this error which fell below our usual editorial standards,” which only raises questions about those standards because this keeps happening.
