BBC blamed Israel for aid massacre on word of single Palestinian source
A BBC report claiming Israeli troops killed Palestinians at an aid distribution centre was based on the accounts of a single Palestinian journalist and a Hamas spokesman, it has emerged.
The White House has attacked the BBC's coverage of the incident, accusing the broadcaster of taking Hamas's word as 'total truth'.
The BBC's first report on the June 1 incident said that at least 15 Palestinians had been killed by 'Israeli tank shelling and gunfire', according to 'medics and local residents'.
But the 'local residents' amounted to one Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Ghareeb, who told the broadcaster that Israeli tanks had approached and opened fire on the crowd queuing for food.
No medics in the article spoke of tank shelling or gunfire, only reporting the number of dead and injured.
The BBC also included a quote from Mahmud Bassal, a civil defence spokesman, claiming that victims were killed and wounded 'due to gunfire from Israeli vehicles towards thousands of citizens'.
The broadcaster did not mention that civil defence in Gaza is run by Hamas.
As highlighted by the White House, the story was altered several times during the day.
The first report was published on the BBC News website at 5.15am. The story was updated two hours later to increase the claimed number of fatalities from at least 15 to 26.
The death toll was increased to 31 in a third version of the story, published at 2.12pm. That story was updated to include denials from the Israel Defense Forces, and from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which runs the aid distribution centre.
Another update, at 4.23pm, included a denial from an IDF soldier in Rafah, who contacted the BBC to say that Israeli soldiers fired near the crowd but not at them, and nobody was hit.
Finally, at 8.34pm, the headline and opening paragraph were changed to remove references to Israeli tanks and gunfire, instead admitting that the incident was the subject of 'disputed reports'.
The BBC Verify unit – billed by the corporation as experts in fact-checking and rooting out disinformation – also looked into the incident, and concluded the following day that 'it's extremely complicated because we have conflicting reports from multiple sources'. Israel does not allow international journalists to enter Gaza.
On Tuesday, the contentious reporting was held up for ridicule by Karoline Leavitt, Donald Trump's press secretary.
She brandished a print-out of the changing headlines on the BBC story, saying: 'Unlike some in the media, we don't take the word of Hamas as total truth. We like to look into it when they speak… unlike the BBC.'
The BBC has rejected the claims.
Danny Cohen, the BBC's former director of television, said he expected the corporation to dismiss the White House criticism.
Speaking to the Daily T podcast, he said: 'They will take on an uber-defensive posture in response to this, because it has come from the Trump administration, rather than actually look at what they've said.'
Mr Cohen claimed that there was 'anti-Israel bias in the newsroom' and condemned the BBC's rush to put out stories without first checking their validity. 'The BBC should no longer be using this approach, which is 'report first and ask questions later' because it leads to dangerous misinformation from a genocidal terrorist group into the mainstream,' he said.
Mr Cohen added of BBC Verify: 'If it wasn't so serious, it would be a really bad joke. First of all, there is an absolute obsession with Israel. And second of all, it often doesn't verify anything. It just does a report and doesn't prove anything.'
Verify is the brainchild of Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC news and current affairs. A day after the offending report, she announced the launch of BBC Verify Live, in which the team will share its work throughout the day in a rolling news feed on the corporation's website.
Ms Turness described it as 'a new way of working, and an exciting step towards even greater transparency'.
Asked about the Gaza story, a BBC spokesman said: 'As we made clear already, we stand by our journalism, including the accurate attribution of sources throughout our coverage. We continue to press for international independent journalists to be able to report from inside Gaza.'
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