A BBC report claiming Israeli troops killed Palestinians at an aid distribution centre was based on the accounts of a single Palestinian journalist and a Hamas spokesman, it has emerged.

The White House has attacked the BBC’s coverage of the incident, accusing the broadcaster of taking Hamas’s word as “total truth”.

The BBC’s first report on the June 1 incident said that at least 15 Palestinians had been killed by “Israeli tank shelling and gunfire”, according to “medics and local residents”.

But the “local residents” amounted to one Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Ghareeb, who told the broadcaster that Israeli tanks had approached and opened fire on the crowd queuing for food.

No medics in the article spoke of tank shelling or gunfire, only reporting the number of dead and injured.