.@BBCBreakfast, Israel's terms for the ceasefire with Islamic Jihad were pretty clear: quiet would be answered with quiet.
Yet 90 minutes into the ceasefire, the terror group continued to fire rockets at Israeli cities.
So how did Israel breach the ceasefire, @rachelburden? pic.twitter.com/teVhlwGLx7
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 15, 2023
The international media continue to paint Israel as the aggressor in the recent fighting between the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Jewish state. More on this ongoing travesty of the truth can be found here: “Israel vs. Islamic Jihad: No Ceasefire for Skewed Reporting,” by Akiva Van Koningsveld, Honest Reporting, May 15, 2023:
…In our initial May 11 roundup, we called out The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Voice of America and other publications for failing to provide readers with crucial context and background information. However, as Islamic Jihad expanded its firing range to the suburbs of Jerusalem over the weekend, the global media assault against Israel also expanded.
For instance, several prominent outlets, including CNN, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse, in their recap articles asserted that the conflict started on May 9 when the IDF announced Operation Shield and Arrow and neutralized three Islamic Jihad commanders, as well as some of their infrastructure, in defensive airstrikes across the Gaza Strip.
The conflict did not begin on May 9, but on May 2. That was the day that Khader Adnan, a member of the PIJ, and a hunger-striker in an Israeli prison, died – having rejected every attempt by Israeli doctors to persuade him to take nourishment. He was determined to die, to become a “martyr,” and to guarantee his family a generous lifetime income as a beneficiary of the PA’s “Pay-For-Slay” program.
In order to express its displeasure over his death, later the same day PIJ launched 104 rockets into civilian areas of southern Israel. That was when the latest conflict began, not a week later when Israel responded to the May 2 attack by killing three senior PIJ commanders.
The latest flare-up began on Tuesday [May 9], with the IDF launching strikes on Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian militant group it accuses [sic] of planning attacks against Israel,” CNN wrote, in editorial copy that echoed similar accusations by the two wire services.
Yet these pieces omitted altogether that Islamic Jihad had already fired 104 projectiles the week before, following the death of one of its imprisoned senior leaders, Khader Adnan, as a result of a protracted hunger strike that saw him refuse medical treatment. Three people were wounded in Israel from the rocket fire prompting the IDF response.
Fox News likewise disregarded Islamic Jihad’s May 2 war crimes against Israeli civilians, simultaneously promoting the factually inaccurate claim that “Israeli forces killed 33 Palestinians last week in five days of fighting that followed Israel’s killing of three top members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group.”
In actuality, 28 Gazans are confirmed to have died in Israeli airstrikes. Among other terror operatives, the IAF took out Jihad Ghanem, a key official in Islamic Jihad’s military council, Ali Ghali, commander of the group’s rocket launching force, and Jahed Ahnam, who coordinated weapons and money transfers with Hamas. The latter earned infamy for masterminding the 2004 murder of Tali Hatuel, her unborn baby, and four daughters.
The Western media made no mention of the atrocities for which these senior commanders of PIJ were responsible. Had they, for example, reported on their military roles, or that one of them had masterminded the murders of Tali Hatuel, her four daughters, and her unborn baby, that might have aroused sympathy and understanding for Israeli attacks on those three, and that, of course, would never do.
Meanwhile, four more Palestinian were likely killed when Palestinian rockets, fired from densely populated civilian neighborhoods, fell short inside the Gaza Strip. A fifth casualty, 4-year-old Tamim Daoud, reportedly suffered a heart attack caused by the stress of living through yet another Islamic Jihad-initiated military conflict….
Fox News has its numbers skewed. A total of 33 Palestinians were killed in the five days of Arrow and Shield, but not all of them “by Israeli forces.” One was a Palestinian worker hit by a PIJ rocket while he was in Israel. Four others, at least three of them children, were killed when a PIJ rocket misfired, and landed short in Gaza. The actual figure, then, is 28 Palestinians killed. Of that number, the Palestinian Health Miniistry reported that at least 18 were PIJ fighters, which meant that there were at most 10 civilians killed during five days of fighting, and after 197 PIJ targets were hit by Israeli airstrikes. Such an astonishingly low number of civilian deaths is convincing evidence of the remarkable precision of Israeli pilots, and a tribute, too, to their policy of calling off a mission if they detect the presence of civilians too close to the intended target.
In the most glaring example, BBC anchor Rachel Burden told viewers of the broadcaster’s Breakfast show on Sunday that “a ceasefire between Israel and Islamic Jihad militants in the Gaza Strip appears to be holding despite reports of minor breaches on both sides.” [Emphasis added]
Quaere: Was the volley of rockets hurled from Gaza by the PIJ on late Saturday, or the single rocket launched on Sunday night by the PIJ, really a “minor breach” of the ceasefire, or something much more serious? And when Israel responded to that breach, was that response also a “breach” of the ceasefire, or had the PIJ rockets brought a halt to the ceasefire, so that Israel’s response could no longer be considered a breach of what was now a non-existent “ceasefire”?
HonestReporting’s followers on social media furthermore pointed out that the British public broadcaster seemingly attempted to mislead viewers by showing B-roll video of an Iron Dome interceptor missile being fired, directly followed by footage of a missile impact in Gaza. To be clear: Iron Dome is an air defense system, and its Tamir interceptor missiles are solely used to save lives by intercepting rockets before they can cause mass casualty events….
The BBC showed what appeared to be an Iron Dome missile landing in Gaza. But Iron Dome missiles intercept incoming missiles of the enemy exploding them in the air on impact. Whatever missile was shown landing in Gaza by the BBC, it was not part of the Iron Dome system. The BBC footage was misleading.
Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post have provided their readers with a detailed account of the terror attacks carried out by PIJ. But without that knowledge, how can those readers judge the appropriateness of Israel’s response? And why did the BBC mislead its viewers about the Iron Dome missile’s use by turning it into an offensive weapon, and dismiss the PIJ volley of rockets as a ‘minor breach” of the ceasefire? And why were Israel’s airstrikes, after the ceasefire had been broken by the PIJ, wrongly characterized by the BBC’s Rachel Burden as a “breach” of a ceasefire that, at least temporarily, had ceased to exist? Finally, why did Reuters, CNN, Agence France-Presse, and Fox News all wrongly insist that the fighting began on May 9 when, in truth, it began on May 2, when the PIJ launched 104 rockets into Israel?
Questions, questions. Let’s wait here for their answers.
Aum says
I would love to cancel my BBC license fee – legally.