BBC editor has no regrets for falsely blaming Israel for Gaza hospital blast

When Bowen was confronted about his exaggeration that the hospital was ‘flattened,’ he replied, ‘Oh, yeah. Well, I got that wrong.’

By World Israel News Staff

A BBC News editor, Jeremy Bowen, declared on the BBC’s “Behind the Stories” program on Saturday that he didn’t “regret one thing” about his false reporting claiming that Israel was responsible for the explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital that supposedly “flattened” the building.

Although the BBC issued a correction of their inaccurate coverage, Bowen insisted, “So it broke in, I suppose, mid-evening. And to answer your question, no, I don’t regret one thing in my reporting, because I think I was measured throughout. I didn’t race to judgment.”

When Bowen was confronted about his exaggeration that the hospital was “flattened,” he replied, “Oh, yeah. Well, I got that wrong.”

He continued, “I was looking at the pictures and what I could see was a square that appeared to be flaming on all sides. And there was a, you know, sort of a void in the middle. And it was, I think it was a picture taken from a drone.”

Bowen added, “We have to piece together what we see. And I thought, well, it looks like whole buildings gone. And that was my conclusion from looking at the pictures. And I was wrong on that. But I don’t feel too bad about that.”

The BBC wasn’t alone in accepting the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry’s version that the Israelis blew up the hospital. The New York Times, CNN, and the Associated Press also rushed to judgment.

It was discovered and proven later that the explosion at the hospital was caused by a misfiring of rockets launched by the Palestinian terror group Islamic Jihad.

On October 19, the BBC issued a statement correcting their faulty coverage of the blast.

“We accept that even in this fast-moving situation it was wrong to speculate in this way, although he did not at any point report that it was an Israeli strike. This doesn’t represent the entirety of the BBC’s output and anyone watching, listening to or reading our coverage can see we have set out both sides’ competing claims about the explosion, clearly showing who is saying them, and what we do or don’t know.”

BBCGaza hospitalhamas warPalestinian Islamic Jihad