BBC promotes Israel's lies about aid massacre

The Western media is still actively collaborating with Israel's propaganda machine, 20 months into genocide

Here is a hideous example of how the Western media, including the BBC, helps facilitate Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The Israeli state is repeatedly massacring starving Palestinians desperately trying to get aid, and the Western media’s refusal to spell out those facts has enabled these atrocities to happen again and again.

As a recap: Israel instituted a total blockade on anything and everything from getting into Gaza on 2nd March. The consequence of this is that 100% of Gaza’s population is now at risk of famine according to the United Nations.

Israel then set up something called the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’, a shadowy US-Israeli front whose funders are hidden, which all aid agencies - who actually have experience of distributing aid at scale - condemned as violating the very basics of humanitarianism - for example, independence. And indeed the US marine appointed to head the Foundation himself resigned stating it violated the necessary principles of "humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence".

Indeed the Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has publicly declared this is a ruse - that Israel will allow only the “minimum necessary” to enter so “that the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes.” By “stop us”, of course, he means complete the genocide.

In practise, this so-called Foundation is just another stage in Israel’s genocide. It has only set up three sites in the south, in an attempt to force Gaza’s population to all move to a confined area where they can be enclosed in a concentration camp and then the survivors expelled.

The aid being provided is much too little, and indeed is often not usable - for example flour and dried pasta when there isn’t the means to cook them because Israel has blocked those means from entering Gaza.

It also based on a lie - that Hamas is stealing aid, the justification for the siege - when the likes of Cindy McCain, widow of late staunchly pro-Israel Republican Senator John McCain and head of the World Food Programme amongst others have said this is simply not happening.

We know that the so-called Israel Defence Forces, the army responsible for executing the genocide, is in charge of this system, because their spokesman just went out and said it.

And allowing small amounts of aid to enter a territory with a starving population is asking for looting and riots, not least because of criminal gangs who are operating under the nose of the Israeli state, who all the evidence shows are cooperating with the Israeli army - and because the Israeli state keeps murdering local security personnel whose job includes guarding aid.

In any case, the aid points in practise mean cramming Palestinians into fenced camps, manned by Israeli soldiers and thuggish American mercenaries, with images reminscent of hideous horrors of our past. And crucially, the Israeli army keeps massacring Palestinians at these aid points. And much of the Western media has simply failed to spell out the inarguable facts - that the Israeli state is massacring these Palestinians.

On 27th May - at the very outset - the Israeli army opened fire at Palestinians queuing for food in these circumstances.

On 1st June, dozens of Palestinians were slaughtered and hundreds more injured as they waited for food at so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution centres in Rafah.

There is ample footage from Palestinians of being shot at by Israeli machine guns. There is also the testimony of doctors, like Dr. Victoria Rose, a British surgeon at the only remaining functioning hospital int he south of Gaza.

The NGO Medicins Sans Frontieres published testimonies from survivors, too.

According to Mansour Sami Abdi, a father of four:

People fought over five pallets. They told us to take food—then they fired from every direction. I ran 200 metres before realising I’d been shot. This isn’t aid. It’s a lie. Are we supposed to go get food for our kids and die?

They also published the testimony of Mohammad Daghmeh, a Palestinian man displaced in Al-Qarara, Khan Younis:

I was shot at 3:10am. As we were trapped, I bled constantly until 5:00am. There were many other men with me. One of them tried to get me out. He was shot in the head and died on my chest. We had gone there for nothing but food — just to survive, like everyone else.

According to the Red Cross, they received the highest number of “weapon-wounded” people in a single incident since the hospital was set up a year ago.

The Israeli army then resorted to their usual tricks when they commit atrocities - a combination of lie, deflect, gaslight, muddy the waters. They issued a statement declaring:

All aid was distributed today without incident. No injuries or fatalities as noted in our daily update sent out earlier.

We have heard that these fake reports have been actively fomented by Hamas. They are untrue and fabricated.

The Israeli authorities then issued footage which they say showed Hamas shooting at civilians, in the words of an Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman “to prevent them from reaching aid distribution points.”

This was a lie. This wasn’t Rafah where the massacre took place - it was Khan Younis, and as Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada put it:

An Israel-backed gang looted 7 trucks of flour & sold it to starved people $30 per bag. Anyone that tried to take a bag without paying was shot at or beaten up. All under the surveillance of Israeli drones that did nothing!

Israel then changed their story. An IDF official then said that Israeli soldiers fired “warning shots toward several suspects who advanced toward the troops” - without saying who the suspects were.

The modus operandi of the Israeli state is completely transparent. They carry out these massacres and sow chaos, knowing a supine media will lap it up and fail to do their job, and then when their lies are taken apart, it’s too late, attention moves elsewhere, and the atrocity they’ve perpetrated ends up filed in a box labelled “the fog of war”, where everyone is encouraged to conclude they simply don’t know who is really responsible.

And despite all the overwhelming evidence of what’s actually happened, despite the overwhelming evidence of Israel lying over and over again - mainstream media organisations collaborate with Israel’s propaganda strategy.

Take the BBC. Their report on the massacre on 1st June is headlined ‘Red Cross says at least 21 killed and dozens shot in Gaza aid incident’. Firstly that’s a drastic underestimate but note how the headline strips away Israeli responsibility - and I’m afraid the data shows that overwhelmingly people do not read past the headline.

Let’s quote from the piece:

A "mass casualty influx" of people, many with gunshot or shrapnel wounds, was received at a Red Cross field hospital in southern Gaza, the organisation said, following disputed reports about an incident near an aid distribution centre in Rafah.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said 21 people were "declared dead upon arrival" while women and children were among 179 cases.

The organisation's statement came after the Hamas-run civil defence agency in Gaza said at least 31 people were killed and many more wounded in the incident, which it blamed on "Israeli gunfire" targeting civilians.

But the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said findings from an initial inquiry showed its forces had not fired at people while they were near or within the aid centre.

The IDF also released drone footage it said showed armed and masked men throwing stones and shooting at civilians while they were collecting aid in the nearby city of Khan Younis. The BBC could not immediately verify the footage.

Note how the BBC call the massacre “disputed”, so we file it under “fog of war”, and refuse to present the obvious fact that Israel is responsible. Note instead how they refer to Israeli guilt via a Hamas claim, which they know undermines faith in the claim. Note how they then just present the Israeli denials of responsibility as credible. Note how they then also include reference to footage which is completely irrelevant, which is criminal gangs shooting at Palestinians elsewhere, which they know will encourage readers to believe that, for example, Hamas could be really responsible for the massacre instead.

The BBC does all of this - despite the video evidence, despite the witness testimonies, despite overwhelming evidence of Israel relentlessly lying about its atrocities, despite so many other previous comparable massacres which I’ll come on to, and despite crucially that this is happening in a closed Israeli military zone. This is within their hub which they are manning. The BBC is suggesting it is somehow plausible that Hamas could be freely operating within a hub manned by Israeli soldiers. That is insane.

And what about Sky News? Their headline:: IDF issues denial after reports of at least 31 people killed in Israeli attack near aid distribution site

So do they just print any old denial from anyone? Vladimir Putin? North Korea? Assad when he was in power? No, they don’t.

At length, it gives space to Israeli denials, including Israel deputy minister of foreign affairs preposterously claiming that the attack could be “Hamas propaganda”.

They quote the Foundation, which is an Israeli front, in its statement:

All aid was distributed today without incident. No injuries or fatalities as noted in our daily update sent out earlier.

"We have heard that these fake reports have been actively fomented by Hamas. They are untrue and fabricated.

These are all lies, and Sky News should not be amplifying these lies and treating them as credible.

For context, on 29th February 2024, Israeli forces massacred over 100 Palestinians waiting for food in the so-called Flour Massacre. The Israeli state played all the same games they’ve played here. Then about 6 weeks later, CNN did a detailed rebuttal of all the Israeli lies about their massacre. But it was too late - attention had moved on.

This strategy is deployed over and over again: for example, when the Israeli military massacred 16 Palestinian paramedics and first responders earlier this year and buried them in a mass grave, which they lied through their teeth about, even when footage of what happened was released - and the media, including the BBC, again went along with these Israeli ruses.

Once again, yesterday, the Israelis have committed another massacre at a so-called aid site, killing dozens of Palestinians.

We have to rely on surviving Palestinian journalists, Hind Khoundary, on al-Jazeera to find out what has actually happened - doing the job the BBC and other organisations have failed to do .

According to a doctor at Nasser hospital, most of the victims are children aged between 10 and 13, many with gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

The idea that Israeli snipers peering through their gun sights do not know they are about to shoot little children in the head and chest is a fantasy.

When the BBC first reported the massacre on their news channel, they described it as a “fatal incident” and now Gaza has become “Hamas-controlled Gaza”, and Israeli responsibility is only attributed to a claim by Hamas, immediately sowing doubt.

And this use of “Hamas-controlled Gaza” is not a one off. The BBC seems to have suddenly introduced “Hamas-controlled Gaza” into their reporting. It also features in an online report from BBC journalist Barbara Plett Usher, in a report which again does not establish Israeli blame and includes past Israeli denials as credible.

“Hamas-controlled Gaza” has all sorts of implications - not least deflecting from the reality that Israel is the occupier with all the responsibilities that come with this, not least providing humanitarian aid.

This is an instructive and disturbing case study of how the Western media collaborates in practise with the Israeli propaganda campaign.

The Israeli state knows it can keep massacring Palestinians because the BBC and other media outlets will help them to deflect responsibility.

Israel’s genocide would not be possible without Western states arming and supporting it. And if the Western media actually did their job, it would be impossible for Western governments to continue facilitating genocide.