Has the BBC mauled the truth?

Was a Gaza man with Down's syndrome really attacked by an IDF dog and left to die?

Last week, I was browsing the BBC website when I came across “Gaza man with Down's syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC”. On the face of it, this was an appalling story about the death of a disabled civilian, Mohammed Bhar. But something didn’t feel right.

Here’s a taste of the tone of the writing: “There was always his family. When he was bullied at school, and beaten, they were there to embrace him when he came home. And when the war started and he was terrorised by the sound of bombs falling, someone always said things were going to be OK.” The sympathies of the reporter, Fergal Keane, are abundantly clear. But the following section caught my eye:

“Along with other residents of Shejaiya, east of Gaza City centre, the Bhars were given orders to evacuate by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The IDF was advancing into Shejaiya in pursuit of Hamas fighters fighting from tunnels and houses. But the Bhars were tired of moving.”

Tired of moving? Really? To the extent that they’d risk their lives, or that of their disabled son?

A few days before, I had been speaking on the phone to an anti-Hamas Palestinian friend of mine in southern Gaza. I asked him about food shortages in the Strip. He told me that everything he and his family needed was freely available at the local market, at prices only slightly higher than before the war. Previously, Hamas had been stealing aid and selling it at exorbitant prices, he said. But with the terror group in disarray, this had come to an end. Provisions were now entering Gaza and being sold as normal.

This contrasted with overblown reports of deprivation by the United Nations and NGOs. I asked him about the discrepancy. The people who had ignored IDF instructions to evacuate northern Gaza, and who chose to remain in the war zone, were indeed suffering from shortages, he said. “But it is their own fault,” he insisted. “They only stayed there because they were family of Hamas men who were fighting there. They are Hamas families.”

If I had learned this over the phone from Britain, surely the information would have been accessible for the BBC team on the ground. Yet the “dog attack” story, in which a man was mauled after having failed to evacuate the firing zone, contained no hint of this important fact.

Instead, it appeared to disguise the likely terrorist connections of the family it interviewed so sympathetically, as well as the mortal danger facing the Israeli soldiers as they tried to treat the wounded Palestinian while dealing with their own casualties (“of course, the army left him”, Fergal Keane wrote, without mentioning that they were dealing with a fallen comrade nearby).

The investigative researcher David Collier subsequently did the legwork that the BBC appeared to neglect, uncovering some crucial facts. You can read his excellent work in full on his blog. But here are the main points.

To begin with, the first person to talk about the attack on Mohammed Bahr online was his brother, Mekael Bahr, who happened to work for an Islamic Jihad propaganda channel. Did this make the BBC treat the story with caution? Did it make them question whether Mohammed Bahr existed, and the circumstances in which he had reportedly died? Apparently, it did not.

Secondly, the source for the tale was Mohammed’s mother, a widow called Nabeel Al Yazji, who speaks, Keane tells us, in a “weary tone”, as if jaded beyond reason by the brutal Israeli campaign. Here’s a sample of how her testimony is portrayed in the BBC account:

“Nabila is left with an image of her dead child that refuses to go away. ‘This scene I will never forget… I constantly see the dog tearing at him and his hand, and the blood pouring from his hand… It is always in front of my eyes, never leaving me for a moment. We couldn't save him, neither from them nor from the dog.’”

Tragic indeed. But what the BBC neglects to mention — but Collier has since pointed out — is that Nabila’s husband was buried in a Hamas flag and headband. Moreover, the public profiles of the family include multiple examples of open support for terror. Sarah, for example, a sister who was on the scene, openly glorifies Hamas and celebrates the murder of Jews on social media, while two brothers, Adam and Saif, who were arrested by the IDF in the same house, can be seen posing with weapons and combat vests in pictures available online.

This does not mean that Mohammed Bhar deserved to die. But it does shed new light on the reason his family may have ignored instructions to evacuate him to safety, and questions the reliability of the story as a whole. An alternative headline may have been: “Gaza man with Down's syndrome dies in raging battle after his Hamas-supporting family ignores warnings to evacuate the warzone.”

All the required information may have easily come to light for the BBC if its reporters had kept in mind that many of those who defied IDF evacuation orders were terrorist families. Or if they had taken the time to Google the relevant social media accounts.

Which brings us to the most damning point. According to Collier, in the IDF statement to the BBC, officials had said that there had been terrorists inside the house when Mohammed Bhar was mauled. Strangely, the BBC omitted this important detail. It would seem that the broadcaster places more weight on the words of a Hamas widow from a terrorist family than those of the Israeli authorities, which it appeared to quote selectively.

Fergal Keane has famously suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He has presented a documentary about it. In one of his awful experiences some years ago, he had been caught up in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. He has movingly described how that experience returned to him in flashbacks over the years. 

Was he the best person to cover the Gaza story?