Video: BBC’s Simmonds at it again – repeating Israeli claims as fact, omitting the obvious

Once again, Samantha Simmonds cuts off inconvenient fact-teller – as Skwawkbox has shown, she was a member of a Zionist youth movement

BBC News presenter Samantha Simmonds was at it again on Saturday. As Israeli prisoners of war were released as part of the ongoing exchange deal, she:

• went on about how thin the three men looked but neglected to mention the fact that Israel has been starving Gaza for many months
• described released Palestinians as criminals and droned about how awful that must be for Israelis, while neglecting to mention the massive number of arbitrarily detained Palestinian hostages, the torture they face in Israeli concentration camps – which has been condemned by the United Nations – or the suffering of two million Palestinians under Israeli genocide
• claimed Israel’s occupation of Gaza ended in the ‘early 2000s’ despite the finding of the International Court of Justice that it continued unbroken up to this day
• claimed 1,200 Israelis were killed by Palestinians when in fact it has been known for more than a year – and was admitted by then-Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant this week – that Israel killed hundreds of its own people in ‘Hannibal’ mass slaughter attacks that were repeated throughout 7 October 2023 from early morning until late evening
• cut off an expert who put forward clearly inconvenient facts

and more.

Nor did she mention that one of the freed captives, Eli Sharabi, may be the same Eli Sharabi whose Linkedin profile shows him as a ‘security and investigations’ professional for the IDF in Israel, or that the other two men were almost certainly serving or former IDF soldiers because of compulsory military service in Israel.

But Simmonds has a track record as an ardent advocate of Israel, as Skwawkbox revealed in 2023, when she regurgitated false ‘Labour antisemitism’ smears and cut off a guest who challenged them with reality:

BBC reporter who cut off ex-chair who challenged ‘Labour antisemitism’ smear was pro-Israel activist

As a young person Simmonds, a 2015 Telegraph article confirmed, was a member of Zionist youth group Habonim Dror, which has the Israeli flag on prominent displays at its meetings and holds Zionism as a central tenet:

The conflict of interest between Simmonds’s apparent Zionism and the BBC’s supposed impartiality is not mentioned on any BBC web page that Skwawkbox could find, nor does it appear to be mentioned in the ‘about’ section of her own website:

Former BBC News editor Rifat Jawaid covered the latest interviews, comments and ‘pro-Israeli biases’ in a video on his YouTube channel titled ‘Busted – BBC abruptly ends interview after guest corrects presenter on Israeli propaganda’:

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