Since the 7 October massacre, various institutions across the West have damaged their reputations when covering the murder of 1,200 Jews. Chief among them is the BBC which outdid itself in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Around midnight, the Israel Defence Forces released a media statement announcing that it was launching an operation against Hamas in a part of Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital, which the terrorist organisation uses as one of its command centres. The Reuters agency relayed the information via its news wire service, relied upon by journalists across the world. This is the story in its entirety:

Nov 15 (Reuters) – The Israeli military said its forces were carrying out an operation on Wednesday against Hamas within Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al Shifa.

In a statement, the military said: “Based on intelligence information and an operational necessity, IDF forces are carrying out a precise and targeted operation against Hamas in a specified area in the Shifa Hospital.”

The military said: “The IDF forces include medical teams and Arabic speakers, who have undergone specified training to prepare for this complex and sensitive environment, with the intent that no harm is caused to the civilians.

At 12:09am, a newsreader on BBC News Channel picked up on the story. Or a version of it.

At this moment we are hearing from Reuters, that is reporting that Israel – it says its forces are carrying out an operation against Hamas in Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital and they are targeting people, including medical teams as well as Arab speakers. They are also saying that Israel is calling on all Hamas operatives in the hospital to surrender at this point. 

Once again, we are hearing from Reuters that Israel says that its forces are carrying out an operation against Hamas in that hospital that we had just heard of there, targeting Arab speakers as well as some of the medical staff there, and they are asking all Hamas operatives in that hospital to surrender.

So, the IDF said it was taking specially trained medical teams and Arabic speakers into Al Shifa Hospital to minimise harm to civilians and the BBC reported that as the IDF targeting medical staff and people who speak Arabic.

Quite apart from the breakdown in journalistic standards from a global broadcaster, it’s hard to overstate the incendiary nature of this broadcast. The BBC is a global news source. It is a highly trusted one, though incidents like this certainly call that into question. Like Reuters, it is relied upon by journalists the world over. Unlike Reuters, it is also broadcast on televisions across the globe. Its reach is vast.

This was a terrible mistake made in a rush, and went out on only one bulletin (although the correction took nine hours). But why the rush? BBC News Channel is jokingly called Sky News +1 because it’s so late with breaking news: if that lateness means it’s taking extra steps to verify, then fair enough. But we see a rush, here, to get out implausibly bad news about Israel. There ought to be several protocols on every new development to make sure every fact is checked, layers of editors to check accuracy. It’s obvious that, even now, no such system exists. The BBC is still being jaw-droppingly cavalier with the truth.

It’s hard to overstate the incendiary nature of this broadcast

And this after several scandals. After the explosion at Al Ahli hospital in Gaza, BBC correspondent Jon Donnison editorialised on air that it was ‘hard to see’ how it could have been caused by anything ‘other than an Israeli air strike’. He provided no evidence to support his assertion. BBC News deputy chief executive Jonathan Munro described this as a ‘mistake’. When an anti-Semitic mob stormed Dagestan airport in Russia, saying ‘We are here for the Jews, we came to kill them with knives and shoot at them’, the BBC described them as simply ‘anti-Israel’ (the BBC says it later updated the piece to reference that the mob targeted Jews). When the Israelis arrested Palestinian Ahed Tamimi for incitement – she is accused of posting on social media: ‘We will slaughter you and you will say that what Hitler did to you was a joke, we will drink your blood and eat your skulls’; her mother denies she wrote the post – the BBC described her as ‘an international symbol of resistance to Israel’s occupation‘. In fact, Tamimi became an international symbol because she was jailed in 2018 after admitting to the aggravated assault of an Israeli soldier and incitement to violence (the BBC does mention her crimes in the piece). When Emmanuel Macron of France told the BBC: ‘These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed’, the Corporation reported the allegation without quotation marks in its headline: ‘Macron calls on Israel to stop killing Gaza’s women and babies’. (The BBC says ‘Macron calls on’ is sufficient for there to be no quotation marks).

While it is content to run headlines like that and describe Tamimi as a symbol of resistance to Israel’s occupation, the BBC refuses to describe Hamas as a terrorist group, saying this would compromise the objectivity of its reporting. This despite its reporting of the 2011 Norwegian massacre speculating whether it was ‘a terror attack’ and its Paris correspondent previously identifying the 2020 church stabbings in Nice, a stabbing attack outside Charlie Hebdo’s former offices and the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty as ‘terrorist attacks’ (the Corporation said guidelines introduced in 2019 dictate that the term shouldn’t be used without attribution). Last month, the BBC News website reported the shooting dead of two Swedes in Brussels as a ‘terror attack’, before apologising that it had not initially attributed the words. The BBC said it has been criticised by both sides, but denied that was proof that ‘we’re getting things right’.

BBC News issued an apology for its false claims about the Al Shifa Hospital operation:

And now an apology from the BBC. BBC News, as it covered initial reports that Israeli forces had entered Gaza’s main hospital – we said that medical teams and Arab speakers were being targeted. This was incorrect and misquoted a Reuters report. We should have said IDF forces included medical teams and Arabic speakers. We apologise for this error which fell below our usual editorial standards. The correct version of events was broadcast minutes later.’

At this point, we’re more than familiar with the BBC’s editorial standards.