Over the last five weeks, the trend in BBC reporting to
ignore events that show Israel in a negative light, while affording
coverage to tenuous claims from the Israeli army that it has uncovered
Palestinian “terror” plots, has become quite glaring.
On 19 March, a 14-year-old Palestinian child, Yussef Shawamreh,
was shot in the back and hip by Israeli soldiers as he foraged for
edible wild thistles on his family’s land in the occupied West Bank.
The child bled to death. His two friends, aged 12 and
17, were seized by soldiers dressed in black fatigues and wearing black
face masks, and taken to a nearby illegal settlement, in handcuffs and
blindfolds. There they were beaten for failing to answer questions in
Hebrew, a language neither understands.
By any standards, the cold-blooded killing of a
14-year-old by soldiers, and the subsequent abuse of his young friends,
is appalling. The media outcry if the boy had been Israeli and his
killers Palestinian can only be guessed at.
As it is, with the dead child being Palestinian, the BBC
ignored the story. The previous week, the BBC also failed to report on
the killing on 10 March of university student Saji Darwish, also in the West Bank.
Saji, a university student, was shot in the head by Israeli forces as he tended his goats.
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