On Friday 30 July, the Israeli city of Ashkelon was struck by a Grad missile fired from the Gaza Strip. The missile hit a residential area, blowing out windows and damaging property. Mercifully, only two people were treated for shock with no major injuries or deaths. Nonetheless, this represents a serious incident and a potential escalation on the part of the Palestinians despite the recent easing of the Israeli blockade on Gaza.
Even as this communique goes to press, Israeli media reports on a missile attack aimed at the Israeli resort of Eilat and the Jordanian city of Aqaba, apparently fired from Sinai.
Too many times, the media fails to distinguish between cause and effect. Israeli self-defence has been portrayed as aggression, precisely because the initial Palestinian attacks have been under-reported, underplayed or even unreported. In this particular case, both the Palestinian attack and the Israeli response occurred on the same day.
Therefore, the last action before print deadline was that which generated the headlines in Saturday morning’s newspapers, placing the emphasis on Israel rather than the Palestinians who initiated the violence.
So how did the UK press cover the story?
Choice of Headline
Despite this, one example of a relatively accurate headline was the Daily Telegraph’s Israel retaliates with air strikes in Gaza, which at least through the use of the word “retaliates”, implied that Israel was responding to something. This was certainly an improvement over The Guardian’s Israel air strikes on Gaza kill Hamas commander, the similarly titled Hamas commander killed in Israeli raid from The Times (subscription only), and The Independent’s Israel kills senior Hamas rocket maker taken from an Associated Press report.
Grad Rockets: An Accurate Portrayal?
Ashkelon was struck by a Chinese-made 122mm Grad accurately described by The Daily Telegraph:
The Grad is more sophisticated and has a much heavier payload than the crudely-fashioned Qassam rockets, made in Gaza, that are the stock-in-trade for most of the territory’s armed groups. As such, it could easily have caused casualties.
Of course, nothing should detract from the fact that Qassams are capable of causing mass casualties in the event of a direct hit on a civilian target, something that The Daily Telegraph should be aware of.
The Times (subscription only) evidently failed to grasp the gravity of this type of weapon being used against an Israeli city. While mentioning the large number of rockets fired from Gaza since the end of Operation Cast Lead, the newspaper merely described the latest as a “longer-range Katyusha-type missile”.
The Guardian, meanwhile, didn’t even bother to identify the missile type.
BBC: A Case Study in Bias
The BBC demonstrated exactly what is wrong with its coverage of Israel. In its headline Hamas fighter killed in Israel air strikes on Gaza, could the BBC have found a more sanitised way to describe a terrorist bomb maker and senior Hamas leader?
But it gets worse – the BBC does not just underplay the effects of rockets from Gaza, but fails to even mention that this particular attack employed the more powerful and longer-range Grad missile:
Rocket fire from Gaza has reduced in the past year after Hamas reined in attacks, but sporadic fire from other militant groups continues.
Correspondents say such attacks are almost always ineffective, with rockets mostly landing in open fields.
Who are these nameless “correspondents” that the BBC relies on make a judgement on just what constitutes an effective rocket attack? Even when such rockets have failed to hit a target, the act of firing them at Israeli civilians forced to take cover in shelters, disrupting everyday life, is terrifying enough irrespective of casualty figures.
In fact, approximately 110 rockets and mortars have been fired at Israeli territory since the beginning of 2010, and over 400 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel since the end of Operation Cast Lead.
All of these rockets are fired with the express intention to kill and maim Israeli civilians – something that the BBC seems incapable or unwilling to acknowledge. As such, the BBC turns a blind eye to the reality and distorts the truth.
And just to make the point that the BBC is more concerned with a seeming imbalance in the casualty figures, its report states:
One Thai farmer in Israel has been killed in the past year.
Dozens of Palestinians, some of them civilians, have been killed in attacks from Israel over the same period.
Using a simplistic description lacking in any context, the BBC succeeds in ensuring that Israel comes across as an aggressor by downplaying Palestinian rocket attacks, removing their murderous intent and portraying Israel as the killer of Palestinians. Thus Israeli self-defence is given the same moral equivalence as the terrorist acts emanating from Gaza.
The BBC has, once again, demonstrated its insidious form of anti-Israel bias.
ITN: Propaganda for Hamas
In a short video report, ITN broadcast footage of those injured in the aftermath of the Israeli air strikes. It also falsely describes Gaza as “occupied territory” and gave airtime to a Hamas spokesman to repeat the same claim, despite the area being under Hamas control and free from Israeli army or civilian presence since the 2005 disengagement.
You can send your comments to the BBC Complaints website – http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints (for detailed instructions on how to navigate the BBC Complaints website, click here).
Complaints to ITN can be addressed here – [email protected] – referring to the July 31 report, which can be found on ITN’s YouTube channel here.
