Eyeless in Gaza: the BBC’s Verify unit
(Image created in Shutterstock)
In May 2023 Deborah Turness, the BBC’s News CEO, announced a new unit “to check and verify information and video content before it appears on our platforms”. “In all,” she wrote, “BBC Verify comprises about 60 journalists who will form a highly specialised operation with a range of forensic investigative skills and open source intelligence (Osint) capabilities at their fingertips.”
She was right in one crucial respect. With so many manipulated images and video footage it has never been more important for news programmes to distinguish true images from false, to help win back the trust of BBC news viewers.
A few months later the conflict in Gaza began following the barbaric attacks by Hamas terrorists on civilians in Israel. This was surely the perfect moment for BBC Verify to help viewers make sense of the propaganda war that ensued. Unfortunately, BBC Verify has failed every crucial test.
First, if you look at its website, surprisingly few items are about the conflict in Gaza: just 3 out of 32 reports. An astonishingly low number for an issue which has bitterly divided opinion for months.
Let’s review these three reports. Here the problems escalate. On 19 October BBC Verify’s Merlyn Thomas reported on the controversial claims and counter-claims surrounding the attack on the Al-Ahli Arab hospital. This was a perfect test case to demonstrate the Verify Unit’s ability to sort out false claims made in the heat of war. “Hamas immediately blamed Israel and Israel said it was a misfired rocket from Gaza.” She conveniently forgot to mention that BBC News reporter Jon Donnison also “immediately blamed Israel” and that he was not corrected by the presenter, Christian Fraser. A curious omission.
“Information about this trajectory would help us establish the origin,” she said, “but we can’t establish that from this video.” “A second video also captured the sound. But an expert told us that based on that alone it’s not possible to identify whether that by an Israeli air strike or a misfired rocket from Gaza.” She goes on, “We’ve also seen chaotic scenes from other hospitals that were treating the injured.” Unfortunately, it was not possible to tell who filmed the very short video clip shown or whether it was fake footage, which has abounded during the Gaza conflict. Thomas’s report ends, “We still don’t know if there were munition fragments in the debris, which would help us work out what weapon caused the explosion.”
This, surely, is precisely the point of BBC Verify.
1) To take a contentious issue and through meticulous analysis show who was right and who was wrong.
2) To show whether footage shown by BBC News is authentic or fake. BBC Verify did neither.
A month later, BBC Verify turned to another hugely contentious issue: “BBC assesses footage of hostages and tunnels released by Israel”, crucial to its claim that al-Shifa hospital had a command centre beneath it. BBC Verify also examined “CCTV footage which they [the Israeli military] say shows two of the hostages abducted by Hamas being brought to the hospital,” seemingly against his will by a group of men with guns. Hamas has always denied both claims. International opinion was, again, divided. Surely, a job for BBC Verify. And BBC Verify was able to identify the two hostages from earlier footage on 7 October, taken half an hour before the footage at al-Shifa.
So far so good. But unfortunately Caroline Hawley’s report ends: “Now we don’t know where the two people we saw in that IDF video are, as Israelis hope desperately for a deal that would release all the hostages.” So, once again, a key contested issue which BBC Verify failed to resolve.
On 30 January, BBC Verify produced its third and most recent report, showing that “at least half of Gaza’s buildings [are] damaged or destroyed”, with analysis by two American academics which shows increasing damage in Gaza from 12 October to 29 January. Of course, this is not contentious. Everyone knows there has been massive damage in Gaza. Considerable loss of life and damage to buildings and Gaza’s farmlands. All of the testimony comes from Palestinian civilians. There are no quotations from individual Israelis, just two single sentences: “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has said it is targeting both Hamas fighters and ‘terror infrastructure’, when challenged over the scale of damage.” Then this more damning quote: “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.” What this report doesn’t do is tell us anything new. Nor does it clarify a key issue that is disputed: is the damage done to buildings in Gaza justifiable or proportionate?
So BBC Verify has taken three of the most contested issues of the conflict and failed to clarify the key arguments on both sides. This is yet another key failure in BBC News coverage of Gaza. They had a very simple job. To analyse footage of the bombing of a hospital, footage of hostages in a Gaza hospital and evidence of devastation of buildings and farmland in Gaza and say which claims and counter-claims were right and which were misleading. But they failed to do any of this.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.
