The BBC published criticism Monday of a false report claiming that Israeli soldiers had killed dozens of Palestinians in Gaza at an American aid site in Gaza on Sunday — then promptly published another.
As Breitbart News reported on Sunday, Hamas claimed — and the BBC, CNN, and others dutifully repeated — that Israeli solders fired at Palestinians from an aid site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Hamas and the United Nations (UN) are desperate to discredit the GHF, which has been providing aid, for free, outside of mechanisms controlled by Hamas terrorists, thereby undermining both Hamas and the UN.
The GHF and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) denied that there had been any such incident, and on Monday U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee demanded that mainstream media outlets retract their false reporting.
The BBC then published an article Monday disputing claims that footage, originally published by Al Jazeera on social media, which showed bodies on the ground, was a depiction of killing at the GHF aid site.
It wrote:
We have geolocated the clip to a spot in Khan Younis about 4.5km (2.8 miles) from the nearest aid distribution point. The direction of shadows suggests it was filmed in the evening, not the morning, which doesn’t match accounts of the Rafah shootings.
While verifying the clip, a local journalist who filmed another video of the same scene confirmed to us that the events pictured are unrelated to any aid distribution site, and occurred yesterday evening after 19:00 local time (16:00 GMT).
Nevertheless, the BBC published a similar report on Tuesday, claiming at least 27 Palestinians had been shot “while waiting for aid,” and citing “Gaza authorities” — i.e. Hamas — without verifying the sensational claim.
The IDF disputed that report, stating:
Earlier today (Tuesday), during the movement of the crowd along the designated routes toward the aid distribution site—approximately half a kilometer from the site—IDF troops identified several suspects moving toward them, deviating from the designated access routes. The troops carried out warning fire, and after the suspects failed to retreat, additional shots were directed near a few individual suspects who advanced toward the troops.
The GHF also confirmed that the distribution of aid at the site had taken place without any violent incidents.
Israeli government spokesman David Mencer later briefed journalists and confirmed that the incident had happened half a kilometer from the aid site, and only involved a few individuals. He pointed out the absurdity of claiming that Israel was killing civilians at aid sites that it was trying to encourage Palestinians to use.
No media outlet bothered to explain why Palestinian civilian would continue to flock to aid sites where they were supposedly being killed by Israeli forces lying in wait, as Hamas had claimed for several days.
“The IDF did not fire at civilians in, or near, humanitarian aid distribution zones,” Mencer said.
He also linked fake news to terror attacks against Jews in the U.S. “Hamas invents lies, the media unfortunately repeat them, and the result is Jews murdered, or Molotov cocktails thrown at them.”
Mencer reminded reporters of IDF footage showing that Hamas, not Israel, had fired on Palestinian civilians seeking aid from GHF Sunday, because Hamas wanted to control aid distribution to the local population.
“That is their last hold on power,” Mencer said. He also noted that Hamas and had pushed fake claims about atrocities since the beginning of the war, which the media repeated every time, burying later corrections.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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