“This title is a deliberate misrepresentation of reality (that’s the polite equivalent of ‘this is a LIE,’ if you don’t get it). Israelis were targeted by Hamas and IDF acts to protect them,” Israel said of BBC coverage on the news.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday issued an official condemnation of the BBC for its skewed reporting on Israel and the rocket attacks it has endured from Hamas in Gaza and demanded that it change its biased headline.
Israel’s citizens in the south experienced a nightmarish evening on Wednesday when Hamas terrorists fired over 180 rockets at them, repeatedly setting off Code Red alerts that sent them running for cover.
The Iron Dome defense system intercepted 30 rockets, while several of the explosive projectiles fell inside Israeli towns, causing injuries, some of them serious, and extensive damage.
The Israeli Air Force (IAF) responded by attacking over 150 Hamas terror targets throughout the Strip, including a cement factory used by Hamas to build terror tunnels, a maritime terror tunnel shaft, a weapons manufacturing and storage facility, and several terror sites in military compounds.
In one of the IAF’s retaliatory attacks, a 23-year-old woman and her one-and-a-half-year-old baby girl were accidentally killed. The father was seriously injured.
The BBC chose to focus on this one accidental event and ignore everything else when it wrote in its headline “Israeli air strikes ‘kill pregnant woman and child.'”
Irate, Israel’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon tweeted: “BBC World this is a formal complaint by @IsraelMFA.”
Posting a screenshot of the BBC’s headline, Nahshon wrote that “this title is a deliberate misrepresentation of reality (that’s the polite equivalent of “this is a LIE”, if you don’t get it). Israelis were targeted by Hamas and IDF acts to protect them.”
“Change it IMMEDIATELY!!!” he demanded.
At the time of the writing of this article, the BBC’s headline read “Gaza air strikes ‘kill woman and child’ after rockets hit Israel.”
History of Media Bias
The BBC has been criticized in the past on multiple occasions for its anti-Israel agenda and even its false reporting on events in Israel.
In July 2017, former chairman of the BBC Lord Michael Grade blasted the network for its biased coverage of Palestinian terror attacks.
Specifically, Grade took the BBC to task for its outrageously misleading coverage of the murder of a 23-year-old Israeli policewoman by Palestinian terrorists, which the BBC reported under the headline, “Three Palestinians killed after deadly stabbing in Jerusalem.”
“If the BBC can get this wrong,” Grade said, “it is little wonder that Israel finds it so hard to put aside the idea that some critics are motivated by something more sinister than political commentary.”
While the media has denied its bias against the Jewish State, numerous documented incidents of media bias and unprofessional journalism demonstrate that there is indeed systemic bias on the part of the foreign press in Israel.