Is BBC purposedly spreading fake news in times of conflict? An analysis by The Telegraph

The Telegraph has pointed to the dangers of falsified or erroneous information and facts being shared in times of conflict not only by individuals but media outlets and governments, as is the case at the moment with the Israel-Hamas war. Caliber.Az reprints this article.

"Since the Hamas atrocities in Israel, social media has been awash with fake news and racial hatred. According to a study, one in five social media accounts participating in conversations about the attacks is fake.Around 30,000 fake accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, have been spreading pro-Hamas disinformation.

But the problem is not limited to bots and professional propagandists. Many of those spreading untruths and half-truths online are those who used to be known as the verified, 'blue-tick' brigade: the journalists and commentators who work for some of the world’s most prestigious media empires.

Following the explosion last Tuesday at the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, Hamas claimed that 500 people had been killed and the cause was an Israeli missile strike. Any serious journalist would have treated this claim with deep suspicion. Hamas is a terrorist organisation that had raped, maimed, murdered, beheaded and taken hostage innocent civilians only 10 days earlier. The idea it could know so quickly the precise death toll – when it takes sophisticated states days to produce such numbers – was clearly suspicious.

And of course, there is no distinction at all between Hamas itself and the 'Palestinian sources' and 'health officials' feeding lines to the Western media. For Gaza is a one-party terrorist state. Hamas controls everything that goes on there. It steals aid sent to the Palestinian people. It repurposes civilian infrastructure to build tunnels and missiles. It murders its opponents.

Yet the BBC rushed to repeat the Hamas claims. 'It is hard to see what else this could be, really', reported Jon Donnison, 'given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike, or several air strikes … when we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza we’ve never seen explosions of that scale'. The BBC has since claimed that this was a one-off comment amid other reports that made clear responsibility for the explosion was not yet known.

But even as the British government said we should await the facts, President Biden confirmed the explosion was caused by 'the other team', and credible open-source intelligence analysts explained that an Israeli air strike never happened, and that the cause was probably a misfired rocket launched from within Gaza, the BBC stuck to its guns.

Even when it became clear that the hospital was still standing, and the explosion occurred in a car park, the BBC persisted. Even now, a BBC post still online on X says: 'Hundreds of people have been killed in an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials'. In contrast, when Israel said communications intercepted in Gaza had discussed the misfired rocket, the BBC said it had 'not been able to verify [the] claims'.

The hospital explosion was not the only incident. The weekend before, a BBC report told readers of a 'strike' against a convoy of civilians fleeing northern Gaza. It referred to a 'strike' four times and 'attack' four times, adding that the Palestinian Health Ministry had 'blamed Israel'.

UK government sources told me on that Sunday that British intelligence believed the explosion originated from the ground not the air, and that responsibility lay with Hamas, which was trying to stop civilians – who it uses as a human shield – from leaving the area. The BBC quietly updated its report, boasting of its ability to 'verify', but still referred to a 'strike' and the Hamas claim that Israel was responsible.

The reporting of the terror attacks against Israel, and the military response in Gaza, has opened up questions about the nature of news and the objectivity of reporting. Elitists and the traditional media cite the volume of fake news on social media; disruptors and tech enthusiasts point to the sanitised and selective reporting of broadcast news in particular.

Both are right. Social media, with its lack of controls, giving voice to extremists and its algorithms promoting dark content to the vulnerable, can be dangerous. But X was also the means by which much of the world discovered the truth of the attacks in southern Israel while the BBC and others still talked euphemistically about 'militants' and 'incursions'. Even now, after much pain in the Jewish community and evidence of the worst of the atrocities, the BBC will only say Hamas is 'proscribed as a terror organisation by the UK Government and others'. They have explicitly decided not to say that the deliberate murder of Israeli civilians – not even the reported beheading of children – is terrorism.

This dubious relationship with truth is not limited to the media. This weekend, there were pro-Palestine and anti-Israel protests in London. At a rally organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist organisation banned in countries around the world, a speaker asked: 'What is the solution to liberate people from the concentration camp called Palestine?' The answer came: 'Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!' When this was reported to the police, the Met said they had not 'identified any offences' and 'the word ‘jihad’ has a number of meanings'.

But the meaning seemed clear from the context. The speaker stood next to a sign declaring: 'Muslim Armies! Rescue the People of Palestine'. The call to demonstrate on the Hizb ut- Tahrir website referred to the 'heroic feats carried out by the heroic Mujahideen in the Blessed Land – Palestine' and the need to 'liberate the blessed Masjid Al-Aqsa from the clutches of the occupying Jews'.

And this is it. For all the concern about misinformation, and the dubious attempts by partisan figures to become arbiters of truth, the biggest problem is surely that we are so often told by those in a position of authority not to believe what we see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. The unequal application of the law. The male sex attackers faithfully described by the media as female. The terrorism said not to be driven by religious fanaticism but the 'mental health' of the perpetrator.

The truth is not whatever we believe or perceive it to be. But the trouble with post-modernism is that it can become self-fulfilling. When those in positions of power decide the truth can be whatever they wish were the case, the floodgates open. Now it is not clear they can ever be closed, and that spells grave danger for all of us".