This week Israeli security forces announced the capture of Mu’in al Arabid, reported to be a senior Hamas internal security and intelligence chief. He was identified by Palestinian sources as being responsible for tracking down Palestinians accused of collaboration with Israel and accused by Israel of heavy involvement in the Oct. 7 massacre and the subsequent movement of hostages within the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli raid has been described as “daring” with conflicting reports as to the level of cooperation with Gazans opposed to Hamas.
The BBC’s Yolande Knell reported on the incident with an article on the website on Sept. 1 titled “Israel says Hamas security chief captured as strikes kill four during Gaza raid”, an appearance on the Global News Podcast of the same day, and at least one TV appearance on Newsday on Sept. 2. Her reporting focused heavily on civilian casualties:
Israeli air strikes carried out during the raid killed at least four Palestinians, including two children and a woman, medics said. Hamas condemned Israel’s actions as a “grave crime” and violation of their ceasefire.
A jeep stopped in the middle of the street and started firing indiscriminately left and right. It carried on firing at us like rain for more than 15 minutes”, Wafika al-Helou, who lives in a tent in the area, told AFP news agency. “It was terrifying”
“The ensuing Israeli strikes “resulted in a number of people being killed and others injured, in addition to the deaths of several members of the special forces unit”, he added.”
However, there is a key issue upon which Knell is completely silent; the question as to why such a senior security figure was even present in such a densely populated civilian area in the first place. This illustrates with perfect clarity a key issue the BBC must address, and a new rule which must be added to BBC guidelines, not to protect Israelis, but to protect Palestinians, and any other population which may have the misfortune to discover that their deaths have become politically useful to one party or another in any armed conflict.
Hamas embeds itself in civilian infrastructure, this is not a contentious point, but a known fact. The issue that seems less universally accepted is why.
Civilian deaths are strategically valuable to Hamas. When they embed in a civilian location there are two possible outcomes, either the Israelis will not attack, or civilians will die. When those civilians die or are injured, the images of their suffering can be spread around the world, creating outrage and deepening anti-Israel sentiment.
This is Civilian Casualty Harvesting. A grotesque grandchild of the blood libel, Civilian Casualty Harvesting relies on the complicity of the media to spread the images and, crucially, to never question who is responsible for the deaths. In the days of the medieval blood libel, smearing the Jews with the blood of gentile babies was as simple as starting a rumor. One was never required to produce the bodies. In the modern era however, manufacturing those corpses drives hatred of the Jewish state, and of Jews more generally. In an asymmetric conflict, one of whose goals is to isolate the Jewish state internationally, the images and reports harvested from dead human shields are of immense strategic value.
This is a subtly separate, complementary strategy to Human Shielding, defined in the Law of Armed Conflict as
Utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations.
Every time a media outlet uncritically spreads the story of civilian suffering caused by Hamas embedding its fighters in civilian infrastructure without clearly labeling that strategy, they are not only allowing themselves to be recruited into the propaganda strategy of an Islamist terror organisation, they are also inadvertently creating an incentive to keep producing more death. Put simply, as long as the strategy works, it will continue.
This is not to say that journalists like Knell should not report on civilian deaths. It is to say that there must be added safeguards to BBC content to explicitly prevent the British national broadcaster from ever creating an incentive for harm to civilians.
The BBC already has guidelines related to child protection. For example:
Content makers must take due care over the physical and emotional welfare and the dignity of under-18s who take part or are otherwise involved in editorial content… Their welfare must take priority over any editorial requirement.
And
Under-18s must not be caused unjustified distress or anxiety by their involvement in output or by the publication or broadcast of that output.
These safeguards do not go far enough because they do not anticipate a world where BBC content can actively incentivize the harm of a child. It is a horrific reality that Hamas has brought us crashing into that world, but we cannot be so complacent as to think if the strategy works, others will not use it. Conflict has changed, information warfare has changed, conflict journalism must change with it. Furthermore, the protection of civilians cannot only extend to children, prevention of incentive to harm must be enshrined within BBC editorial guidelines for all civilians.
Any report, like this one from Yolande Knell, where one side is known and proven to be embedded in civilian infrastructure as a matter of strategy, must name that strategy. A simple formulation, like the many the BBC employ when it comes to Israel, to say “Hamas routinely embeds in civilian areas for strategic purposes”, would deal an immediate and devastating blow to the process of Civilian Casualty Harvesting, making its continuation less strategically valuable.
The BBC cannot end the strategic sacrifice of Palestinians by their own leadership, but what it can do is ensure, with that one sentence, that the British public can never be implicated in the death of a single Palestinian child knowing that their licence fees and taxes fund a broadcaster that refuses to be complicit in the strategy that causes those deaths.