The BBC has of course proved itself over and over again a wildly unreliable source of information bearing on Israel. It’s an absurd news organization of long-standing.
The BBC’s idiocy goes back at least to the 1930s when it systematically barred Churchill from discussing his critical defense and foreign policy views. Sir John Reith was head of the BBC at the time. In his biography of Churchill, William Manchester states that “Reith saw to it that [Churchill] was seldom heard over the BBC…” Reith wrote of Churchill in Reith’s monumentally voluminous diaries, “I absolutely hate him.” To bring the story up to date one need only substitute “Israel” for “Churchill.”
In the video below, however, the BBC analyst does a good job of reviewing the video footage recently released by the IDF from the Shifa tunnel and hospital CCTV footage. Her analysis corroborates the IDF’s. She draws no larger conclusions, but this is well done.
The @BBC spells out the concrete evidence for Hamas abusing the Shifa Hospital for military purposes, building tunnels underneath it and abducting hostages into it on October 7. pic.twitter.com/CwF36cVTcc
— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) November 20, 2023
By contrast, a related story by BBC Jerusalem correspondent Nick Beake tries to make the best of it in the traditional BBC style:
Responding to the video released by Israel, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said it was not able to confirm the authenticity of the footage.
Doesn’t that suggest that the Hamas-run “health ministry” is something less than a reliable source of information? I should think so, but Beake does not. He drinks his “health ministry” stuff straight.
Beake continues with more from the “health ministry.” He can’t get enough:
The ministry also said it was Israel which bore full responsibility for the deterioration and collapse of health services in Gaza.
Earlier, the IDF released a video that it said showed a tunnel 10m (33ft) below ground that runs for 55m up to a closed and reinforced door.
It said this was now part of the evidence that “clearly proves” numerous buildings in the hospital’s complex have been “used by Hamas as cover for terrorist infrastructure and activities”.
The latest video is not yet the evidence that’s been promised of the sort of vast and intricate operation depicted in a computer simulation which the IDF previously released showing what it believes any Hamas base underground at al-Shifa could look like.
Beake refers to Israel’s war as “its military campaign of retaliation, which it says is aimed at eliminating Hamas…” However, the war is one of self-defense with the patent goal of eliminating Hamas. Only a fool with a certain animus would fall back on the he said/she said convention regarding Israel’s goal in the war. And Beake omits any mention of the criminal nature of the Hamas way of war. Instead he chooses to focus on whether the hospital was a Hamas headquarters or something lesser.
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