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Despite All Evidence, BBC Still Defends Hamas Casualty Figures
The BBC logo is seen at the entrance at Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters in central London. Photo by Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
In the early hours of April 23, the BBC News website published a report by the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Yolande Knell under the headline “Gaza health ministry denies manipulating death toll figures.”
Only in paragraph eight do readers discover the purpose of Knell’s report:
Recently, several media reports have raised questions about the reliability of the statistics by highlighting anomalies between the August and October 2024 and March 2025 lists of fatalities. The reports focus on how some 3,000 names of people originally identified as fatalities were removed from later revised lists.
Among those media reports is an article titled “Hamas ‘quietly drops’ thousands of deaths from casualty figures” — which was published by the Telegraph on April 1 — and cites research carried out by Salo Aizenberg showing that 3,374 names, including over a thousand children, had been dropped from Hamas’ March 2025 list of supposedly identified and confirmed casualties.
On April 5, Sky News published a report titled “Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list” which quotes “[t]he head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi”:
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing. […]
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
Over two weeks later, the same Hamas health ministry statistician (who, as readers may recall, was credited by the authors of a paper published at the Lancet in January 2025) was quoted in Yolande Knell’s report:
A Gazan health official, Zaher al-Wahidi, denied to the BBC that victims had vanished or that there was a lack of transparency, insisting: “The health ministry works towards having accurate data with high credibility.
“In every list that gets shared, there is a greater verification and revision of the list. We cannot say that the health ministry removes names. It’s not a removal process, rather it is a revision and verification process.”
Al-Wahidi’s admission that the names on successive lists are subject to revision and verification is ample indication of the reliability of those lists and the ensuing statistics that the BBC has uncritically quoted and promoted as being reliable for the past 18 months, in line with an editorial policy that has existed at least since 2014.
Knell’s report later includes the following quote:
“It seems like they’re actually updating the lists more in real time, as more information appears,” says Professor Mike Spagat of Royal Holloway College, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation. “We should have regarded the previous lists as a little bit more provisional than I had assumed.” [emphasis added]
The Sky News report includes a quote from the same person:
“”This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.”
Nevertheless, Knell suggests to her readers that the Hamas-supplied figures can be considered reliable because they are used by “UN agencies” and “the media”:
The figures are cited with attribution, by UN agencies and widely in the media.
While Knell does note the failure of the Hamas supplied data to distinguish between civilians and combatants, she does not explain that that policy is deliberate and long-standing:
The list does not distinguish between civilians and members of Palestinian armed groups who are killed in the war, and Israel has accused Hamas of inflating the percentages of women and children.
Neither does she clarify that the Hamas-supplied lists most likely include casualties caused by shortfall missiles launched by Gaza Strip-based terrorist organizations as well as Gazans killed or executed by Hamas.
Knell’s reference to Hamas “inflating the percentages of women and children” as solely an Israeli accusation fails to inform BBC audiences that for months on end, BBC journalists promoted Hamas claims that 70% of the casualties were women and children, despite the absence of verified data to support that claim.
Later in her report, Knell states:
Israel periodically estimates the number of Palestinian fighters killed. At the start of this year, it assessed that 20,000 members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were among the dead. In mid-April it said there had been “more than 100 targeted eliminations” in the past month.
She however fails to inform her readers that in February 2024, the BBC dismissed Israeli assessments of the number of terrorists killed by citing the same 70% women and children mantra which it later abandoned.
Members of the corporation’s funding public may be wondering why the BBC News website chose to publish this report by Yolande Knell, given that it has no new information to add to what was provided in the Sky News report published 16 days earlier.
One possible explanation lies in the fact that for 18 months, the BBC has uncritically quoted and promoted Hamas’ claims concerning casualty figures, despite faulty methodology, changes in the methodology used, repeated removals of names, the inclusion of natural deaths and people killed in previous rounds of conflict, and the absence of independent verification.
This report by Knell would appear to be just yet another chapter in the BBC’s repeated attempts to justify that dubious editorial policy.
Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.
The post Despite All Evidence, BBC Still Defends Hamas Casualty Figures first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Pulls Out of Two More Bases in Syria, Worrying Kurdish Forces
US military vehicles drive in Hasakah, Syria, Dec. 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Orhan Qereman
US forces have pulled out of two more bases in northeastern Syria, visiting Reuters reporters found, accelerating a troop drawdown that the commander of US-backed Syrian Kurdish forces said was allowing a resurgence of Islamic State.
Reuters reporters who visited the two bases in the past week found them mostly deserted, both guarded by small contingents of the Syrian Democratic Forces – the Kurdish-led military group that Washington has backed in the fight against Islamic State for a decade.
Cameras used on bases occupied by the US-led military coalition had been taken down, and razor wire on the outer perimeters had begun to sag.
A Kurdish politician who lives on one base said there were no longer US troops there. SDF guards at the second base said troops had left recently but declined to say when. The Pentagon declined to comment.
It is the first confirmation on the ground by reporters that the US has withdrawn from Al-Wazir and Tel Baydar bases in Hasaka province. It brings to at least four the number of bases in Syria US troops have left since President Donald Trump took office.
Trump’s administration said this month it will scale down its military presence in Syria to one base from eight in parts of northeastern Syria that the SDF controls. The New York Times reported in April that troops might be reduced from 2,000 to 500 in the drawdown.
The SDF did not respond to questions about the current number of troops and open US bases in northeastern Syria.
But SDF commander Mazloum Abdi, who spoke to Reuters at another US base, Al Shadadi, said the presence of a few hundred troops on one base would be “not enough” to contain the threat of Islamic State.
“The threat of Islamic State has significantly increased recently. But this is the US military’s plan. We’ve known about it for a long time … and we’re working with them to make sure there are no gaps and we can maintain pressure on Islamic State,” he said.
Abdi spoke to Reuters on Friday, hours after Israel launched its air war on Iran. He declined to comment on how the new Israel-Iran war would affect Syria, saying simply that he hoped it would not spill over there and that he felt safe on a US base.
Hours after the interview, three Iranian-made missiles targeted the Al Shadadi base and were shot down by US defense systems, two SDF security sources said.
ISIS ACTIVE IN SYRIAN CITIES
Islamic State, also known as ISIS and Daesh, ruled vast swathes of Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2017 during Syria’s civil war, imposing a vision of Islamic rule under which it beheaded locals in city squares, sex-trafficked members of the Yazidi minority and executed foreign journalists and aid workers.
The group, from its strongholds in Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, also launched deadly attacks in European and Middle Eastern countries.
A US-led military coalition of more than 80 countries waged a yearslong campaign to defeat the group and end its territorial control, supporting Iraqi forces and the SDF.
But Islamic State has been reinvigorated since the ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December at the hands of separate Islamist rebels.
Abdi said ISIS cells had become active in several Syrian cities, including Damascus, and that a group of foreign jihadists who once battled the Syrian regime had joined its ranks. He did not elaborate.
He said ISIS had seized weapons and ammunition from Syrian regime depots in the chaos after Assad’s fall.
Several Kurdish officials told Reuters that Islamic State had already begun moving more openly around US bases which had recently been shuttered, including near the cities of Deir Ezzor and Raqqa, once strongholds for the extremist group.
In areas the SDF controls east of the Euphrates River, ISIS has waged a series of attacks and killed at least 10 SDF fighters and security forces, Abdi said. Attacks included a roadside bomb targeting a convoy of oil tankers on a road near the US base where he gave the interview.
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Trump Says US Won’t Kill Iran’s Supreme Leader, ‘At Least Not for Now’
US President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, Feb. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday the US knew exactly where Iran‘s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was “hiding,” that he was an easy target but would not be killed, at least for now.
“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
“But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin,” Trump said.
The post Trump Says US Won’t Kill Iran’s Supreme Leader, ‘At Least Not for Now’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Suspected Israeli Hackers Claim to Destroy Data at Iran’s Bank Sepah
A hooded man holds a laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration
An anti-Iranian government hacking group with potential ties to Israel and a track record of destructive cyberattacks on Iran claimed in social media posts on Tuesday that it had destroyed data at Iran’s state-owned Bank Sepah.
The group — known as Gonjeshke Darande, or “Predatory Sparrow” — hacked the bank because they accused it of helping fund Iran’s military, according to one of the messages posted online.
The hack comes amid increasing hostilities between Israel and Iran, after Israel attacked multiple military and nuclear targets in Iran last week. Both sides have launched multiple missile attacks against each other in the days since.
Reuters could not immediately verify the attack on Bank Sepah. The bank‘s website was offline on Tuesday and its London-based subsidiary, Bank Sepah International plc, did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Customers were having problems accessing their accounts, according to Israeli media.
Gonjeshke Darande did not respond to multiple messages sent via social media.
“Disrupting the availability of this bank’s funds, or triggering a broader collapse of trust in Iranian banks, could have major impacts there,” Rob Joyce, the former top cybersecurity official at the NSA, said in a post on X.
In 2022, Gonjeshke Darande claimed responsibility for a cyberattack against an Iranian steel production facility. The sophisticated attack caused a large fire at the facility, resulting in tangible, offline damage. Such attacks are usually beyond the capabilities of activist hackers, security experts say, and would be more in line with the capabilities of a nation state.
The group has also been publicly linked by cybersecurity researchers to a 2021 cyberattack that caused widespread outages at gas stations across Iran.
Israel has never formally acknowledged that it is behind the group, although Israeli media has widely reported Gonjeshke Darande as “Israel-linked.”
The post Suspected Israeli Hackers Claim to Destroy Data at Iran’s Bank Sepah first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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