Last night we brought you news of the IDF targeting Hamas terrorists in the al-Shifa hospital where they have a base of operation.
In that article we quoted an IDF statement on the hospital raid that said the IDF had medical teams and Arabic speakers as part of their force for such an operation:
“The IDF forces include medical teams and Arabic speakers, who have undergone specified training to prepare for this complex and sensitive environment, with the intent that no harm is caused to the civilians being used by Hamas as human shields.
That’s extremely clear but in the BBC’s rush to get the story out, they apparently misread an article from Reuters quoted this statement and claimed that the IDF were targeting ‘medical teams and Arabic speakers’.
Thus, they issued this apology on-air:
The @BBCWorld @BBC apologizes after falsely claiming that our forces targeted medical staff and Arabic speakers at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza when IN FACT the @IDF entered the hospital with its own medical staff and Arabic speakers to help patients in need.
Watch: pic.twitter.com/uerrsLr8KB
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) November 15, 2023
You can say this was just a mistake, but it’s clear that the BBC believed that the IDF were actually targeting medical teams in the hospital and couldn’t wait to report it. They never questioned the story until, I assume, someone pointed out their error.
If you or I had misread that statement, we might at least do a double take and then realize what the statement actually said because we are not anti-Israel.