Seventeen months ago the BBC
gave extensive coverage to the story of a child killed in the Gaza Strip during
the conflict between Hamas and Israel in November 2012. The corporation’s
journalists rushed to promote an
unquestioned and unverified version of the story of the death of Omar Masharawi
– the son of a BBC employee – according to which he had been killed in an
Israeli airstrike.
Months later, in March 2013,
that already shaky story was shown to be even less rooted in accurate and
impartial reporting when a UN report stated
that the incident was most likely caused by a misfired rocket launched by one
of the Palestinian terror organisations operating in the Gaza Strip.
The BBC’s
subsequent addition of a footnote to
a report which had at the time appeared on its website for four straight months
did little to correct the damage caused
by the irresponsible and cavalier promotion of an inaccurate story which its
journalists had not adequately verified, but which fit in with their own
preconceived narrative.
Last week a two year-old child
named Mohammed al Hamadin died as a result of
injuries he had sustained in an
explosion on March 11th at his family home in Beit Hanoun in
the Gaza Strip. Mohammed was among some six
people injured and three killed in that explosion. The three dead weredescribed by Palestinian sources as
being “affiliated” with Hamas and indeed the al Qassam Brigades published notification of
the death of one of the men whilst two of the others appear to have also hadSalafi Jihadi connections.
According to AP: “A security official said the
three dead were Hamas militants, and that the blast had been caused while
mishandling explosives.”
“According to media reports
that the explosion, which occurred last week in the home led to the deaths
of three young men who were working on the processing of homemade
rockets.”
The fact that no mention of
this latest incident of a child being killed in the Gaza Strip because of the
actions of Palestinian terror organisations has appeared in any BBC News report
will not come as much of a surprise to readers because the BBC habitually turns
a blind eye to the many cases of Palestinian casualties caused
by short-falling missiles and
other terrorist activity of the type which resulted in the death of little
Mohammed al Hamadin.
That state of affairs raises
uncomfortable questions about which factors in a story relating to Palestinian
casualties make it newsworthy – or not – as far as the BBC is concerned and why
an incident in which a child was killed that does not further a preconceived
political narrative is not told to BBC audiences.
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