It now looks likely that Israel successfully eliminated Mohammed Sinwar and other leaders of Hamas in a targeted strike last week. Which leaves the BBC flagship unit ‘BBC Verify’ looking increasingly like an anti-Israel disinformation machine.
The BBC Verify video on the ‘Gaza hospital strike’
On Tuesday afternoon (13 May 2025) Israel targeted key figures of the Hamas leadership who were hiding in a command centre beneath hospital grounds in Gaza. By Wednesday afternoon BBC Verify had turned the event into another opportunity to spread pro-Hamas propaganda.
The video the BBC Verify team published was all about how terrible Israel is – and carried footage showing how some civilians were almost certainly killed in the Israeli strike. But nothing at all in the video is really disputed at all – so just what did BBC Verify need to mobilise to check?
War is an awful thing – and having a clip of civilian casualties from the deadly strike as the Israeli ‘bunker-busting’ weaponry struck through at ground level near the entrance to the hospital was certainly worth covering in a news bulletin as *PART* of the wider story of Hamas turning hospital grounds into legitimate military targets. But it is not *THE STORY*. Because if Israel is right about Hamas leadership hiding underneath – and it looks as if Israel was right – then that changes EVERYTHING.
The obsessive, amateur activists of BBC Verify
We rarely get a more blatant misuse of BBC resources than this. There was only one issue about the Israeli strike that needed open source ‘verification’. And that is whether Mohammed Sinwar and / or other Hamas leaders were using hospital grounds as cover, or not.
If they were, then the only story in town was about Hamas being caught committing war crimes, removing the ‘do not touch’ exemptions from the hospital, and placing innocent civilians at risk.
And if that could not be verified at the time – and it couldn’t – then the only thing BBC Verify has shown by prematurely addressing the action, is that the unit is staffed by immature hacks who are more interesting in childish propaganda than acting in a professional manner. They had obviously seen (in an IDF post about the incident they claim is errant, along with the footage of the civilian damage) enough for them to string together a demonising post about Israel – which is what their entire piece is about.
But that is not what BBC Verify is supposed to be doing. BBC Verify is meant to be a fact-checking unit. And so it comes back to this – the ONLY fact that matters here is whether the Israelis are right or wrong about the Hamas command post. Did BBC Verify address this and answer that question? No, they did not.
BBC Verify – spreading of disinformation
Which means we can ask a very legitimate question: if BBC Verify was set up to counter disinformation, then why on earth is it continually caught SPREADING disinformation itself? Because it is not like this is the first time.
Even as I was writing this piece, BBC Verify published (17/5) yet another video that pushes a one-sided agenda; takes quotes out of context, misrepresents the truth, demonises Israel, and most importantly, verifies absolutely nothing.
Fronted by Ross Atkins, the latest video, about ‘how world leaders are responding to Gaza’, relies chiefly on an ex-British ambassador to Beirut (currently holding a role at the anti-Israel UN), the PM of Spain (a nation openly hostile to Israel), and a single sentence from President Trump, carefully cherry-picked from 100s of things he (or his administration) has said that play a different tune. This is not ‘fact-checking’, it is not even news – it is the type of amateurish and immature student propaganda that a Qatari state mouthpiece such as Middle East Eye would produce.
The host of the hospital piece
The Verify piece on the strike on Mohammed Sinwar’s hideout under the hospital was fronted by BBC Verify’s ‘senior reporter‘ Merlyn Thomas. She has history. Merlyn has previously worked on plenty of BBC Verify pieces that demonise Israel based on little more than empty speculation and unreliable witnesses. When Thomas delivers the line “Doctors at the hospital; say a number of people there have been killed by Israeli snipers in recent days” she is not verifying anything – she is just pushing empty pro-Hamas propaganda.
In a piece earlier this year that set out to demonise Israel and President Trump, I caught her trying to pass off hard-core Islamist activists in Michigan as ‘liberals’. One of the three people Thomas appeared so desperate to platform was Amer Zahr – a well-known toxic anti-Israel extremist. There is footage of him from 2017 saying he stands proudly with *every* resistance – including Hamas and Hezbollah. Merlyn also interviews Zaynah Jadallah. Another hard-core anti-Israel activist. She is also a Director of the extremist group CAIR, Michigan. Two out of three? Hardly your random Muslims walking around the streets of Dearborn!
BBC ‘Verify’? You are having a laugh.
BBC Verify legitimises the Iranian IRGC
And last March Merlyn Thomas worked on a BBC Verify piece that almost entirely relied on Mahmoud Al Awadeyah – a ‘journalist’ who worked for an Iranian news agency controlled by the IRGC. His social media timeline was full of pro-terrorist and pro-Iranian propaganda. Obviously, the BBC journos at BBC Verify couldn’t be bothered to check.
Merlyn Thomas is symbolic of what has gone wrong with the BBC over the last two or three decades. The BBC is an ideologically driven machine that hires like-minded elitist clones. Thomas spent her pre-BBC days interning at Lebanon’s Daily Star, and the Egyptian Mada Masr Media. Before working for the British media outlet that obsesses about demonising Israel, she worked as a researcher for CRTDA, a Lebanese based NGO ‘working on the ground with refugee women’. This means that our ‘fact-checking journalist’ spent several months working alongside UNRWA in camps such as Ein El Hilweh, Mieh Mieh and of course the infamous Shatila. A perfect fit for the ‘impartial’, ‘unbiased’ BBC.
Obsessive, one-sided, untrustworthy
On the same day BBC Verify were working on their latest libels, a hero of the Oct 7 massacre, Igor Pibenev, committed suicide, becoming another of the many silent victims of the October massacre. On Thursday Tzeela Gez was murdered by Palestinian terrorists. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she was in the car together with her husband on her way to hospital to deliver the baby.
A day later, the BBC News obsessives ran a ‘live updates‘ page about Gaza to further demonise Israel. Neither of those incidents were covered in the 100 or so updates posted on the page throughout the day. The BBC journalists are all only looking in one direction.
Is nobody in the BBC controlling these obsessive anti-Israel activists? Did the Hamas propaganda farce which ended with the BBC needing to pull the plug on a £500,000 documentary teach the BBC executives nothing?
The people at BBC Verify bring shame to anyone working on open source intelligence and who try to maintain professional journalistic standards. If – as I expect (and was the logical outcome for anyone with a brain who has been paying attention during the conflict) – it does turn out that Israel has successfully eliminated Hamas leadership with the strike – then they should all be hauled before a professional standards body and asked to explain just how they justify wasting public money on their amateur antics, unprofessionalism, disingenuous attitudes, and blatant anti-Israel obsession.
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