Jonathan Cook – jonathancook.net May 7, 2025
You can tell how bad levels of starvation now are in Gaza – as the population there begins the third month of a complete aid blockade by Israel – because last night the BBC finally dedicated a serious chunk of its main news programme, the News at Ten, to the issue.
But while upsetting footage of a skin-and-bones, five-month-old baby was shown, most of the segment was, of course, dedicated to confusing audiences – by two-sidesing Israel’s genocidal programme of starving 2 million-plus Palestinian civilians.
Particularly shocking was the BBC’s failure in this extended report to mention even once the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a fugitive for months from the International Criminal Court, which wants him on trial for crimes against humanity. Why? For using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population.
I have yet to see the BBC, or any other major British media outlet, append the status “wanted war crimes suspect” when mentioning Netanyahu in stories. That is all the more unconscionable on this occasion, in a story directly related to the very issue – starving a civilian population – he is charged over.
Was mention of the arrest warrant against him avoided because it might signal a little too clearly that the highest legal authorities in the world attribute starvation in Gaza directly to Israel and its government, and do not see it – as the British establishment media apparently do – as some continuing, unfortunate “humanitarian” consequence of “war”.
Predictably misleading too was BBC Verify’s input. It provided a timeline of Israel’s intensified blockade that managed to pin the blame not on Israel, even though it is the one blocking all aid, but implicitly on Hamas.
Verify’s reporter asserted that in early March Israel “blocked humanitarian aid demanding that Hamas extend a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages”. He then jumped to 18 March, stating: “Israel resumed military operations.”
Viewers were left – presumably intentionally – with the impression that Hamas had rejected a continuation of the ceasefire and had refused to release the last of the hostages.
None of that is true. In fact, Israel never honoured the ceasefire, continuing to attack Gaza and kill civilians throughout. But worse, Israel’s supposed “extension” was actually its unilateral violation of the ceasefire by insisting on radical changes to the terms that had already been agreed, and which included Hamas releasing the hostages.
Israel broke the ceasefire precisely so it had the pretext it needed to return to starving Gaza’s civilians – and the hostages whose safety it proclaims to care about – as part of its efforts to make them so desperate they are prepared to risk their lives by forcing open the short border with neighbouring Sinai sealed by Egypt.
Yesterday, an Israeli government minister once again made clear what the game plan has been from the very start. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said. Gaza’s population, he added, would be forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries” – in other words, Israel intends to carry out what the rest of us would call the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as it has been doing continuously for eight decades.
Simply astonishing. We’ve had 19 months of Israeli government ministers and military commanders telling us they are destroying Gaza. They’ve destroyed Gaza. And yet western politicians and media still refuse to call it a genocide.
Watch Israel’s lips: IT’S A GENOCIDE. pic.twitter.com/gDIZHW5nNo
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) May 7, 2025
What is the point of the BBC having a Verify service – supposedly there to fact-check and ensure viewers get only the unvarnished truth – when its team are themselves peddling gross distortions of the truth?
The BBC and its Verify service are not keeping viewers informed. They are propagandising them into believing a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics that audiences cannot hope to understand.
The establishment media’s aim is to so confuse audiences that they will throw up their hands and say: “To hell with Israel and the Palestinians! They are as bad as each other. Leave it to the politicians and diplomats to sort out.”
In any other circumstance, it would strike you as obvious that starving children en masse is morally abhorrent, and that anyone who does it, or excuses it, is a monster. The role of the BBC is to persuade you that what should be obvious to you is, in fact, more complicated than you can appreciate.
There may be skin-and-bones babies, but there are also hostages. There may be tens of thousands of children being slaughtered, but there is also a risk of antisemitism. Israeli officials may be calling for the eradication of the Palestinian people, but the Jewish state they run needs to be preserved at all costs.
If we could spend five minutes in Gaza without the constant, babbling distractions of these so-called journalists, the truth would be clear. It’s a genocide. It was always a genocide.
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Stop the killing. End the wars now!
bbc verify? I’d never heard of that. LOL.
The last time I watched news on the TV I’m sure the bbc version was at 9pm. Now it’s 10? Presumably to reduce the number who watch it. LOLx2.
At some point, even the most jewish british people (ie. those that “own their own homes”) are going to have to admit that something is just a little off. Like when there actually is a pile of dead bodies millions high (unlike their holohoax).
That guy who makow posts from is still posting his begging from palestine. I still want to know how, when everything else is gone, he’s got an internet connection and the ability to charge whatever he’s using. I’d also like to know why, if all these palestinians are so loving and helping each other, like all humans do, obviously, he has to pay 50 times the price for food while they’re all starving to death. Are they, in fact, jews themselves?
Then there was the admission the other day by someone or other in jewland that hamas is funded by jewland in order to give them the excuse to do exactly what they’re doing. In the jew-k, even mentioning that fact is antisemetic and will land you in jail.
Viva la democracy.
Susan Sarandon among many hundreds to urge BBC to release delayed Gaza film
On israeli terrorism
The Oscar-winning actor Susan Sarandon and the British film-maker Mike Leigh are among hundreds of figures from the cultural world accusing the BBC of censoring Palestinian voices, after its decision to not to show the broadcast of a documentary on medics murdered in Gaza.
Doctors nurses some from my own hospital, osteopaths care and workers
including trauma counselors and other volunteer workers were deliberately targeted for murder, new figures last night were 720 aid worker deaths
israel must be stopped
Though the daily-diet of Izzy-PR propaganda pablum served up by the Bwitish Bwainwashing Cworporation might be sufficient mental&moral nutrition for The Proles…
…Yours Truly went “cold-turkey” on that pigswill – and the rest of the Bwitish tv/print media for that matter! – when trainee insurance-salesman John Majorette was gung-go bombing Serbia jnto oblivion on the pretext of “atrocities” that MI6 shovelled into his thick skull and the gaping maw of the BBC…
with the sh!t-sandwich coming out the other extremity served-up to – and eagerly eaten by – gormless THICK Brits as if it were caviar on a silver-platter!
So, even though I didn’t see the report, its absolutely NO SURPRISE to me that the BBC – the original hand-wringing, ‘crying crocodile-tears on cue’ Agony Aunt’ if ever there was one! – is up to her “old tricks of obfuscation & omission, deflection & deceit, pretense & prevarication,
…. …
then laughing all the way to GCHQ for a pat on head for a “job well done!”… not only for managing to put the blame on the Pal Resistance for the wholesale starvation & slaughter of Gazans.. but also for its assiduous avoidance of any hint of the Bwitish State’s complicity in the carnage through its supplying of intelligence coordinates for Izzy’s bombing runs on any survivors… in furtherance of its ‘Final Solution’ of RAZING GAZA TO THE GROUND!
Of course it’s reporting it all wrong… as far as the Zionist International want it to be covered. For, the Zionist International has conquered the West. In so doing, the West is a partner in the genocide, is complicit in the starvation and forced expulsion, paving the way for the Greater Israel.
That way is paved with the money the Zionist International extorts from the West.
Moment car explodes on road where PM Keir Starmer’s home ‘targeted in another arson attack’
Footage shows the dark blue Toyota RAV4 engulfed in flames as firefighters fought the blaze near the Prime Minister’s North London home.
anti communist pro britain members suspected
I cannot believe not one person has mentioned what Hamas has been up to. Pretty much everyone on this site is in support of the terrorists in Palestine. You’re on the wrong side of history and when the caliphate comes to the western world I will laugh at you all lol
Russia you have to decide if you are friend with
the Palestinians or the with the occupying
ArskeNAZIKhazars . there is no third way .
@jew YOKELL
there is only one terrorist entety in NearEast from
dirty insidious conspiring beginning + massmurdering
Israhell of continuing last 80 years . there is absolutely
no honour in it + murdering reputation (backstabbing)
of Palestinians + Germans . jews are the spirit of lies +
propaganda lies .
Jews are the least religious people in the world: they think you only have to fool the humans, because God is a product of the human mind, and this, however, is an error. The Galilean was foreign to Judah, despite the very first (and false) words of the NT