In the latest sign of Western bias, the BBC  failed to mention the word “Israel” at all when reporting Israeli missiles targeted at least 20 Iranian hospitals and medical centres on March 23. An Iranian strike on one of Israel’s main hospitals last week got significantly more coverage.

Israel has been accused of adopting tactics similar to those it used in Gaza, where it destroyed virtually all of the medical centres and hospitals, causing countless civilian deaths, including three babies that starved to death after a hospital was evacuated in December 2023. Now it has adopted the same strategy in Iran, threatening to cause a humanitarian crisis, say, aid workers.

The western press has been complicit in playing down Israel’s actions, illegal under the Geneva convention, afraid of an Israeli backlash and accusations of anti-Semitism. The BBC has been particularly sensitive to these charges. Following the launch of a major invasion of Lebanon, the BBC reported on the Israeli “push in Lebanon” to seize key border positions, whereas it regularly reports on Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine.

The European response to the war in Iran and Lebanon has been muted, but some leaders have become more outspoken recently. The European Nato members have universally rebuffed US President Donald Trump’s call to send their navies to help with his efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, refusing to be dragged into “not our war.”

Criticism of Israel is an especially sensitive topic, both for historical reasons and because of the White House’s close relationship with Tel Aviv and Brussels’ desire not to do anything to upset the Trump administration.

In the summer of 2024, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s entire staff – some 800 people – released an open letter criticising what they called her “bias” for Israel due to her silence in condemning Israel’s bombing of civilians in Gaza that killed an estimated 75,000 people, mostly women and children. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and an arrest warrant for his arrest on “war crime” charges has been issued. 

Similar one-sided reporting has also been common in covering the polarised Ukrainian story. When Ukrainian far-right football “ultras” trapped several hundred Russian football fans in the Trade Unions House in Odesa in May 2014 and deliberately set it on fire, burning 48 people to death, many of the initial reports were written using the passive voice in a deliberate attempt to avoid blaming Ukrainians for the killings.

Similar questionable reporting surrounds the “snipergate” incident, where members of the Ukrainian far-right opposition have been blamed for randomly shooting demonstrators on Maidan in 2014 in a false flag operation. That story was barely reported by the English-language press, but well covered by the German-language press, and the details have since been fleshed out by academic studies.

Israel has been striking residential areas in both Tehran and Beirut with missiles hitting multiple locations – something that Russia has been widely condemned for in the Ukrainian conflict, albeit at a much larger scale. In Beirut, at least 12 people were killed and 27 wounded in a strike last week, according to Lebanese authorities, in an escalation beyond the southern suburbs into central Beirut on March 18. The Lebanese health ministry said that 968 people, including at least 111 children, have been killed since March 2.

On March 16, Israel targeted a residential building near the government quarter in central Beirut that completely collapsed, causing some to comment that the scene “resembled Gaza,” the BBC reported in a story headlined: “Destruction in Beirut after overnight strikes,” again missing out the word “Israeli.”

Israel continues to target central Beirut, sometimes with prior warnings, and sometimes without, according to local reports, in what appear to be targeted assassinations including at least two strikes on hotels.

Civilians are frequently killed in these attacks, including in “double-tap” strikes – a tactic used frequently by Russia in missile strikes against residential areas in the Ukraine conflict.

As in Gaza, Israeli authorities claim medical facilities were being used by militants posing as refugees but have presented no evidence to support the claim. The same claim was made in the bombing of Gaza, but on several occasions, both local and international journalists debunked those claims and even showed that Israel’s IDF forces had manufactured evidence to support the claims.

Under the Geneva Convention, attacks on medical facilities are a war crime, unless it can be conclusively demonstrated that they are being used for military operations.

The human costs of targeting hospitals have become part of Israel’s standard scorched-earth strategy to make life in Lebanon intolerable. The government in Tel Aviv has said that the approximately one million Lebanese civilians displaced by the conflict will not be allowed to return to their homes.

In Iran, figures cited in regional reporting indicate that Israeli strikes have destroyed 236 healthcare centres, 9,218 commercial units and 67,414 homes in Iran as of March 22.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned that it would respond in kind to further escalation. “We are determined to respond to any threat to the same extent, such that it creates deterrence,” the IRGC said in a statement, threatening to expand its retaliatory strikes to include vital infrastructure including water.

“The lying, terrorist, and child-killing president of the United States has claimed that the IRGC intends to target desalination plants in the region and cause hardship for the people of regional countries,” the statement said, rejecting allegations that it had targeted civilian water infrastructure.

“First, it is the aggressive and anti-human US army that began this war by killing children, including the deaths of 180 elementary school children, and has so far targeted five water infrastructure sites, including the desalination facility on Qeshm Island. The IRGC has not carried out such actions.”

The statement added: “You struck our hospitals, we did not do the same. You struck our emergency centres; we did not do the same. You struck our schools; we did not do the same. But if you strike electricity, we will strike electricity. And victory is only from God, the Almighty, the Wise.”