A post by CAMERA Arabic
In early February the Jewish Chronicle published an investigation into anti-Israel bias and inaccuracies at BBC Arabic. That report includes the following:
“…while the BBC reported in English on 34 fatal terror attacks on Israeli civilians between 2015 and 2020, its Arabic service covered just 25 of these, analysts said, seriously downplaying the extent of Palestinian brutality.”
CAMERA Arabic analysed all incidents since the conclusion of Operation Protective Edge in August 2014 in which Israeli civilians and/or foreign nationals were murdered in Palestinian terror attacks Of the 47 incidents (the JC used data from January 2015 onwards: 42 incidents), BBC English language services failed to report nine, while BBC Arabic failed to cover 18 incidents.
BBC Arabic’s coverage of five additional attacks was also problematic. In three cases, the Arabic service covered the incidents up to the point that there were no Israeli fatalities on record, then opted not to follow-up on the story once the victims succumbed to their wounds a day or more later. In another case, BBC Arabic reported a fatal attack only a week after it happened and an additional incident was mentioned only on Twitter.
In other words, between September 2014 and the present, the BBC Arabic website has only produced timely coverage of civilian deaths resulting from Palestinian terrorism in 51% of the cases. Coverage of the same events by the BBC in the English language stands at 79%.
