Death has climbed in through our windows; it has entered our fortresses.
Throughout these days of unbearable stories, from the slaughter of small children in their kibbutz bedrooms to the fireball at a Gaza hospital where families were seeking sanctuary from bombs, those words have echoed around my mind. Taken from the biblical book of Jeremiah, they entered my thoroughly godless ears via a comforting-sounding rabbi on the BBC and stayed. It is no criticism of its competitors to say that in this house at least, in times of trouble, it’s always the BBC. Though nobody knows better than a journalist that journalists aren’t infallible, there are times when only the Pavlovian effect of the pips or of Lyse Doucet’s voice will do.
Last century, in occupied wartime Europe, people risked their lives to listen to the BBC. This week, we learned that its Farsi-language reporters are now effectively risking theirs, to bring impartial news to Iranians. Lives have always hinged on what the BBC says and does, a fearsome responsibility that most of the time the corporation carries miraculously lightly. But it’s precisely because it’s so loved and trusted that when it errs, it matters. Its handling of Tuesday night’s explosion at al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza accordingly threatens to become an international diplomatic incident in its own right.
The BBC’s initial breaking news alert, simultaneously pinged to millions of phones via push notifications, said simply: “Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli airstrike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say”, with a link to a more detailed report that many won’t have clicked on. Critically, that tweet did not spell out that “Palestinian officials” means a Hamas-controlled government. In the short time it took the Israeli government to check and then deny responsibility, blaming a misfiring rocket launched from within Gaza by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, the idea of Israeli guilt was halfway round the world.
The BBC was far from alone in giving it wings. Gold-plated media organisations from the Reuters news agency to the New York Times fell into a similar trap, and that this newspaper’s early live-blogging and reporting was more cautious about attributing blame is no reason to be smug; like everyone else, the Guardian tweaked its language as more facts emerged, and in the Middle East one word can be everything.
But when the BBC speaks, people believe it. The archbishop of Canterbury shared that initial tweet, denouncing an “appalling and devastating” loss of life; so did Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, whose parents-in-law are trapped in Gaza. Public figures, from politicians to NGOs, responded as if an “Israeli airstrike” was established as fact. Meanwhile, over on the BBC News channel, reporter Jon Donnison noted that though the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had denied responsibility, it was “hard to see what else” could have caused it.
Following the blast, protests erupted from the West Bank to Jordan, Turkey and Tunisia; in Berlin, molotov cocktails were reportedly hurled at a synagogue. President Biden’s summit with Arab leaders in Jordan was scrapped, Jewish communities around the world once again feared reprisal, and for several hours those closest to this conflict must have held their breath, wondering about potential repercussions for the Israeli hostages held captive in Gaza or Iran’s appetite to escalate the conflict. At the time of writing, the UK government’s position remains that it’s too early to identify a culprit, whatever the White House says. But that line won’t hold for ever and in any future ground invasion of Gaza, claim and counterclaim can surely only proliferate.
So, of course, the BBC, Britain’s national broadcaster, faces serious questions not only about its editorial process on the night but more broadly about how, on newly straitened budgets, it should compete with rolling commercial news; whether it’s trying too hard to be first with the story at the expense of being most authoritative, or whether in an era of rampant disinformation, a slow-moving national broadcaster would leave a dangerous vacuum for others to fill. The BBC’s most distinctive asset in a crowded marketplace remains its audience’s trust, and it must not squander that.
But it would be wrong to pretend that without its reporting, the Arab streets would have somehow calmly shrugged off an explosion at a hospital during an Israeli bombardment of Gaza. This would always have been a dangerous moment in what is now both a bloody traditional conflict and a sophisticated modern information war fought – as Ukraine’s has been – in an unprecedentedly noisy, confusing, uncontrollable media environment. That’s a challenge for journalists but also for governments, NGOs and wider civil society, right down to ordinary people scrolling bewilderedly in search of clarity, and perhaps also moral certainty.
What most visibly incenses the Israeli government is the idea of the Hamas regime in Gaza being treated as an equally believable source of information. The IDF’s British-born spokesperson, Lt Col Peter Lerner, erupted in outrage at the BBC’s Mishal Husain for asking if the Israelis would permit independent analysis of evidence they published, seemingly linking Palestinian Islamic Jihad to the hospital attack. It was hardly an unreasonable question, especially given a subsequent Channel 4 report challenging the authenticity of what the Israelis say is an intercepted conversation between terrorists about the explosion, and some may wonder if the ferocity of the response was designed to intimidate. (By Thursday, the Israeli government’s official X (formerly Twitter) account was accusing the BBC of a “modern blood libel”.)
But after days of heartless squabbling on social media about whether babies really were beheaded or simply machine-gunned to death – and if it’s distressing to read that, believe me it’s distressing to write – traumatised Israelis are perhaps unusually sensitive to being called liars. They feel they’re being expected literally to parade their dead before anyone will believe them in a way that wasn’t expected of the US after 9/11, and which perhaps touches deeper nerves given the long Jewish experience of Holocaust denial.
For Palestinians who already feel their plight is being ignored, however, the idea that Israel should automatically get the benefit of the doubt is equally incendiary given the IDF has in the past had to retract early denials of involvement, including in the shooting of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh.
Beyond the timeless journalistic rule that no government deserves a free pass in wartime, what all this boils down to is a reminder that when the fog of war descends it pays to reserve judgment, await facts, count to 10 precisely when you most feel the red mist rising. Unfortunately, those are all skills that rolling news and adrenaline-spiked late nights on X push us irresistibly to forget. It’s not just the BBC that must do better in coming days, but all of us with access to wifi.
Where all is muddle and confusion, it’s natural to seek out authority, decisiveness and the crystal clarity of judgment from on high. Yet sometimes it’s wiser to learn to live, however uncomfortably or temporarily, with doubt.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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