BBC Verify is promoted as BBC’s flagship ‘fact checking’ news service. But as you will see below – BBC Verify is a cheap, amateurish, propaganda device- that is driven by unacceptable bias, and publishes blatant lies worthy of a Russian Soviet era misinformation service.

BBC Verify ‘verifies’ the Iranian missile strike

On Tuesday evening, 1 October 2024, Iran fired approximately 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Many were intercepted, but several sites were hit. On Wednesday evening BBC Verify published a 1 minute 20 second video – titled ‘where Iran’s missiles struck in Israel’.

The BBC Verify team tells us they have been looking at ‘where Iran’s missiles have landed’ and the video is to counter ‘a lot of false imagery’ being circulated online. They say they managed to verify strikes in the vicinity of three key locations – all of them military sites:

This creates an immediate problem. Why only these three? For example, a verified strike by Ramat Gan shopping mall has not been included. The BBC had reported on this – and so were well aware of it – but for some reason, BBC Verify left the shopping mall strike out of their analysis.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that BBC Verify were deliberately pushing a pro-Iranian propaganda line that the missiles were fired only at military targets.

But it gets a lot, lot worse.

BBC Verify and the five mile miss

Having told us that the three targets verified were ‘in the vicinity’ of military targets, we are then shown the evidence. The first we see are several apparent strikes on Nevatim airbase, but it is when the journalist turns her attention to the attack on the Tel Nof base that things become surreal.

We find the base was not hit at all. This is the script:

Location two is the Tel Nof airbase. In this video you can see a crater where a missile has landed. It is not the airbase itself, but a school a few miles away”:

What? So the Iranian’s didn’t hit Tel Nof airbase with this missile – they hit a school. So why isn’t the school listed in the original map. How on earth can BBC Verify know that the intended target of this missile was an airbase? They can’t.

The school that was hit is the Shalhavot Chabad school in Gadera. About 5 miles from the place BBC verify tells us was the target.

To put this into context. Below on the map are two marks, Gaza City Centre and Jabalia camp. The distance between them is approximately the same distance as between the school and the airbase. Can you imagine Israel hitting a school in Jabalia camp and BBC Verify virtually forgiving them by suggesting it was a close call on a Hamas military target 5 miles away.

There is no excuse for this – and it appears to be a deliberate attempt to whitewash an Iranian ballistic missile strike on a school. Why on earth didn’t the BBC put the school as one of the verified strikes on the map at the start? We all know why. For the same reason they didn’t mention the strike on the shopping mall. It doesn’t fit the propaganda story they are seeking to tell.

The journalist – Nawal Al-Maghafi

The piece was presented by BBC Verify’s Nawal Al-Maghafi.

Nawal Al-Maghafi was born in Yemen – one of the countries that just happens to be firing ballistic missiles at Israel. She gives talks at the British Yemini Society.

Following her career path, she began with Al Jazeera – the Qatari state mouthpiece – and wrote for Middle East Eye – another pro-Qatari propaganda machine. Some of her MEE pieces – such as a 2015 video on a journey to ‘Al Aqsa Mosque’ – have (for whatever reason) been removed from the web.

More troublingly she has worked with PRESS TV – a state media outlet of Iran – the country that launched the 180 missiles that Maghafi is meant to be reporting on.

And in 2012 – she is tagged into a conference in Tehran, where the participants ‘held talks with Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Khamenei’ (his speech is here). Attendees also discussed topics covering the Islamic revolution and the victory of the ‘glorious’ resistance in Lebanon and Palestine against the Zionist regime. I cannot ‘verify’ her attendance at this Islamic youth event – but she is clearly tagged into this event.

And then there are things like this – several ‘free Palestine‘ posts on her social media. In this image she is even displaying classic pro-Palestinian stupidity – by implying the Neturei Karta cult (a tiny and very Iran friendly group) are somehow representative of British Jews:

This is the impartial, unbiased journalist fronting the BBC Verify propaganda piece.

Time for BBC Verify to call it a day

The report is fitting for PRESS TV – or Electronic Intifada – or RT Today. It should not – under any circumstances – have ever been funded by the British public.

The BBC has spent decades demonising Israel – but since Oct 7, the situation has become blatant and inexcusable (a few examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Two damning reports have recently been published on BBC Bias (Asserson, Cohen)

The BBC has gone completely off the rails. It isn’t just that it is incapable of putting together proper impartial coverage of Israel’s conflict with its neighbours – it is that it doesn’t think it is doing anything wrong. The inability to even begin to identify the problem it has – means it cannot be salvaged in its current form. No public funds should ever be used to finance something so deeply and irredeemably flawed.

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