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BBC finally admits in main headline: ‘Hamas raped and mutilated women’

BBC coverage focused on reports gathered from video evidence and eyewitness accounts of sexual crimes and mutilation carried out by Hamas terrorists.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

The BBC, which has been criticized for its earlier coverage of the Hamas-Israel war, focused on atrocities committed against Israelis by Hamas with its main headline on December 5th: ‘Hamas raped and mutilated women on October 7.’

The lede to the main article read: ‘The BBC has seen and heard evidence of rape, sexual violence and mutilation of women during the 7 October Hamas attacks.’

BBC coverage focused on reports gathered from video evidence and eyewitness accounts of sexual crimes and mutilation carried out by Hamas terrorists.

“Few victims are thought to have survived to tell their own stories,” the site notes. “Their last moments are being pieced together from survivors, body-collectors, morgue staff, and footage from the attack sites.”

The BBC report also includes graphic accounts, some never before published.

“I spoke with at least three girls who are now hospitalized for a very hard psychiatric situation because of the rapes they watched,” Golan told BBC. “They pretended to be dead and they watched it, and heard everything. And they can’t deal with it.”

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She stressed, “But very, very few” survived. “The majority were brutally murdered. They aren’t able to talk – not with me, and not to anyone from the government [or] from the media.”

The focus on these crimes is a departure for the BBC, which has been criticized for not referring to Hamas members “terrorists.”

In addition, the BBC was described as “lacking moral clarity” by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and was called out for its pro-Palestinian bias in the first weeks of the war.

The BBC was one of the first networks to erroneously blame IAF airstrikes for the explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital on October 17.

A BBC News editor, Jeremy Bowen, declared on the BBC’s “Behind the Stories” program 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.”

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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.”