BBC programme questions whether Hamas massacre took place

A BBC programme has raised questions about whether the Hamas massacre at Kfar Aza kibbutz had really taken place.

On Oct 7, around 70 terrorists burst into the kibbutz, a farming community of 750, and murdered scores of residents, including families and babies.

Trending, a programme on BBC Arabic, suggested there were different versions of the story and that even Jeremy Bowen, the corporation’s Middle East editor who went to the scene, was simply repeating what he had been told by Israeli forces.

The original BBC headline said: “Hamas rejects accusations that its gunmen carried out atrocities in the Israeli Kfar Aza village.”

The headline was later changed before the entire report was removed from the BBC website, and later from YouTube.

A BBC spokesman said: “This report was quickly removed from BBC output as it failed to meet our editorial standards.

“It should not have remained on YouTube, it has been taken down and we are looking into how it remained accessible.”

It comes after the corporation admitted last week that it was “urgently investigating” claims that its journalists had appeared to justify the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas, a designated terrorist group.

Reporters at BBC News Arabic in the Middle East appeared to celebrate an attack that left approximately 1,300 dead, endorsing comments likening Hamas to freedom fighters, as well as describing the atrocity as a “morning of hope”.

The BBC has also faced growing calls to call Hamas terrorists, rather than a “militant group”.

The broadcaster has declined to refer to the group as “terrorists”, citing impartiality rules.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today last week, Mishal Husain said the broadcaster adhered to Ofcom guidelines requiring that “news in whatever form is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality”, and said “all broadcasters” stuck to “the same language”.

But hours later, the regulator said that it was “for the broadcasters to decide the vocabulary they use to describe unfolding events”.

There is “no restriction” on the BBC calling Hamas fighters terrorists, Downing Street has said.

Asked about the broadcaster’s decision not to use the description, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “I think ministers have set out our position on this already.

“The legal position is that Hamas is a proscribed terrorist group – the term terrorist is an accurate legal description.

“The BBC has described other attacks as terrorism – 9/11, 7/7, the Bataclan. To put it into context, the attack we witnessed in Israel was the third-deadliest terror attack in the world since 1970.

“So there is no restriction on the BBC using that term, certainly not from Ofcom who have made it clear that, as long as they meet Ofcom rules on accuracy in news and due impartiality in news, it is for broadcasters to think about very carefully what they use to describe unfolding events.”

He added: “A number of reporting organisations are accurately describing Hamas as a terrorist group. I think accuracy is important in the circumstances.”

‘Different versions of story’

Reporting on the attack at Kfar Aza, Serena Ghokeh, a BBC Arabic presenter, suggested that reports of a massacre had come from Israeli soldiers but that there were different versions of the story.

She introduced testimony from a local woman whose life had been spared by Hamas fighters as proof of a counter narrative.

“BBC correspondent Jeremy Bowen was able to enter the village and accompany the Israeli military unit that returned to the kibbutz after the fighting stopped,” she said.

“According to what these soldiers said, they spent most of the day amidst the destruction, recovering the bodies of civilians. They told the BBC correspondent that a massacre took place in that place, which killed entire families.”

Ms Ghokeh, who is based in London, went on to state that the commander of the Israeli military division that went into Kfar Aza had described how some victims were beheaded.

She said there were pictures of Hamas fighters who were also killed and that such images “reflect a different picture” from the testimonies of the Israelis.

The journalist also quoted an Israeli journalist who wrote on Twitter that he had been into Kfar Aza and found no evidence of children who had been killed.

“The Hamas movement said in a statement that ‘in its operation, it targeted the Israeli military and security system’,” she added.

“It rejected accusations that it had committed violations and added that the Western media must be accurate and not blindly side with the Zionist narrative, which is full of lies and slander.

“Al-Qassam targeted the military and security system, which is a legitimate target, and the video clips from the field and the settlers’ witnesses confirm that civilians and children were spared.”

“Dual-narrative tactic”

A spokesman from the Arabic department of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, a US-based non-governmental organisation that campaigns for “accurate and balanced” coverage of Israel, said: “Between September 2022 and June 2023, we documented six reports in which the BBC itself admitted that its Arabic service wrongfully omitted the practice of targeting Jewish civilians in Israel, thus prompting necessary corrections to the output.

“The ‘dual-narrative’ tactic, i.e. using speculations and half-truths to build an ‘alternative perspective’ that would discredit well-corroborated stories from Israel, is regrettably not new to BBC Arabic either.

“Just last year, its Cairo bureau similarly fabricated a counter-narrative about an alleged Israeli war crime of killing defenceless Egyptian soldiers in 1967, all while interviewing conspiracy theorists as ‘experts’ and even giving platform to a Holocaust analogy.”

He added that the video “combines the two methods to reach a new low of pseudo-journalism, underscoring once more the need for an open, public inquiry into the way the BBC covers Israeli and Jewish affairs. Particularly jarring is the BBC’s choice not to publicly apologise to their Arab audiences for having broadcast the video in the first place; three years ago, another BBC Trending item which whitewashed terrorism triggered such an apology only after three weeks”.