Mick Hartley

Every day, it seems, the BBC leads with another Gaza horror story, straight from Hamas. [Well OK, it's not always Hamas: today it's the Red Cross – "Gaza worse than hell on Earth, Red Cross chief tells BBC as aid centres close for day". As long as they're reliably anti-Israel, the Beeb will listen and headline what they say.]

Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:

1 June 2025. Make a note of that date. For there is a good chance it will be recorded as a day of infamy. As a day when the Jews were once again libelled as the slayers of innocents. As a day when the intellectual classes mimicked their benighted forebears of the medieval era and falsely accused the Jewish nation of spilling blood for sport. For many it was just an ordinary Sunday – but for those who will come to write the history of our times, it will stand out as a day of frenzied hearsay in which Jews were once again branded demons and bloodlusters.

Reports of a massacre in Gaza came early that day. It took place in Rafah, we were told, at one of the distribution centres overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the US-Israel group that’s providing aid to Gaza’s needy. With depthless cruelty, IDF troops opened fire on the half-starved Palestinians queuing for meals. Thirty-one souls were slaughtered in the ‘aid-centre attack’, as the BBC swiftly called it. A venomous fury spread through the internet. No one can deny it now, people cried: Israel is ‘replicating’ Nazi tactics. Just as the Nazis told Jews they were being put on trains for a better life, so the New Nazis promise Palestinians food as ‘a pretext for slaughter’.

There was one problem with these breathless accounts of a wicked massacre: it seems no such thing took place. Last night, the BBC backtracked. It said it has now studied the ‘graphic video’ of the ‘aid-centre massacre’ and has ruled that it is ‘incorrect’. We were told the ‘massacre’ took place early in the morning, yet the ‘direction of the shadows’ in the clip point to an event that took place ‘after 7pm local time’. More devastatingly, the Beeb geolocated the clip and found that it was filmed in a part of Khan Younis that is 4.5km from the nearest aid-distribution centre. A journalist in Gaza confirmed it: the events in the viral clip are ‘unrelated to any aid-distribution site’….

The magnitude of 1 June and its fallout cannot be overstated. Our media classes lapped up the lies of Hamas. They made themselves its Lord Haw-Haws, uncritically repeating a horror story that worked to the benefit of that army of anti-Semites while further isolating the Jewish nation it dreams of destroying. The untruths have piled up this past fortnight. We were told 14,000 Gazan babies would die in 48 hours – not true. We were told Hamas does not hide in hospitals – not true. And we were told the IDF picked off the starving – not true. We are being lied to about Israel on an industrial scale – day in, day out. I have never seen anything like it.

It's been happening since October 7th. Remember the Al-Ahli hospital bombing in late October 2023? Hamas claimed it was an Israeli strike that killed hundreds, and the BBC reported the Hamas story as fact before it turned out that this was a strike on a car park by an errant Islamic Jihad rocket. There's a long history of the BBC's institutional hostility to Israel…

Of course the BBC isn't alone in its hostility to Israel, but it does set the tone – certainly here in the UK, but to an extent worldwide, given its reputation. It's enough for the White House to get involved. And I don't doubt that it's playing a major part in the current explosion of Jew-hatred that we're seeing now.