There’s rarely a day now that the blundering BBC isn’t the news itself. This time the spotlight is back on BBC Verify, the Corporation’s much-lauded fact-checking service launched to combat the scourge of fake news. Yet journalist David Collier has done some digging and has suggested that BBC Verify looks to be falling short of the high standards to which it holds others…

Collier focuses on a recent report from the broadcaster which seemed to insinuate that Israel was directly to blame for Palestinians killed on Thursday as food aid arrived in Gaza. The reporting relies on incomplete IDF video footage, Al Jazeera video and the word of hospital manager Dr Mohamed Salha. Its main eyewitness account, however, is Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Awadeyah. He told the BBC: ‘Israelis purposefully fired at the men… They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.’

But questions have been raised about Awadeyah’s biases after some questionable social media interactions were uncovered. The journalist works for Al Quds Today and the Tasnim News Agency – the latter of which is an Iranian outlet associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Awadeyah himself is an avid Facebook user and frequently takes to the social media platform to make controversial posts.

On International Holocaust Remembrance day last year, a gunman opened fire on Israelis coming out of a synagogue in East Jerusalem, leaving seven dead. That same day, Awadeyah made a post which translates as: ‘A state of rejoicing, exuberance, and mosques confirmed with exuberance.’ Later that year, Awadeyah posted a picture of himself standing in front of a mural that depicted a building in Rehovot targeted by Palestinian resistance groups, in which an 82-year-old woman was killed by an Islamic Jihad rocket. Awadeyah captioned the post: ‘Always rest assured that what is coming is more beautiful, God willing.’

Other posts show the journalist expressing his grief about the death of Khalil Salah al-Bahtini, a commander in the military wing of Islamic Jihad, with Awadeyah posting a photo of the men together, praising his ‘advice’ and ‘guidance’. It’s somewhat troubling, then, that BBC Verify decided to rely fairly significantly on this journalist’s testimony. Collier, the man who dug into Awadeyah’s background, expressed his anger online, writing:

How can the BBC possibly consider this man’s evidence as reliable? He dances when Jewish civilians are murdered, and sits and breaks bread with the leaders of proscribed terrorist groups. Is there a sane person alive who believes this terrorist supporter would not lie for his cause?

BBC Verify, Collier writes, ‘consists of amateurish hacks, who have a supremacist attitude, and who don’t even bother to do the most basic of checks. This is not journalism – it is activism.’ Ouch. For its part, the BBC says that:

We stand by our journalism and reject the allegations in this piece. The BBC is not allowed access into Gaza, but we use a range of accounts from eyewitnesses and cross reference these against official statements and footage, including from the IDF. The fact that someone has expressed an opinion on social media doesn’t automatically disqualify them from giving eye-witness testimony. It is simply wrong to claim an agenda on our part – and ignores much of the journalism we have done, including BBC Verify accounts of the Supernova festival massacre.

But it’s never a good look when the public is left to fact check the fact-checkers…