I was in southern Israel last September, close to the border with Gaza, researching an article on the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas massacres. Our driver was taking us along Route 232, now known as the “Road of Death” since so many people were murdered there. A line of pensioners waiting patiently for a bus were machine-gunned, I was told. We passed a number of small roadside shelters called meguniots which normally offer protection for civilians from incoming rockets. Young partygoers fleeing the Nova music festival hid in these concrete bunkers when they came across dozens of terrorists on the broad highway through the desert.
We stopped at one and I stepped inside. Incredibly narrow and cramped, no bigger than a garden shed, the space had been turned into a shrine with flickering tea lights, photographs of the beautiful boys and girls who breathed their last in there, and QR codes that allowed you to download individual stories. “We are in a horror movie,” a girl’s voice said. “Many people are dead, we are shot in the legs, please help,” yelped a boy. He didn’t make it.
Up to 50 children were packed closely together in that meguniot. Hamas threw grenades in, killing several of them instantly. The injured groaned while those who were still OK made whispered calls to their parents and the police begging for help. Yuval Raphael managed to reach her father. In a recording, you can hear her crying: “Dad, lots of people are dead. Send the police here. Please Dad, send the police, it’s urgent... they’re crushing me.”
“Be quiet,” he replied. “Yuvali, my daughter. Yuvali, breathe deep. Hide. Play dead.”
“Bye,” the 23-year-old said, thinking that was the last time she’d hear his voice.
Yuval Raphael was one of the lucky ones, if anything which happened that pitch-dark day can be called good fortune. The bodies of her friends, and people she’d only just met, fell on her. Every so often, the terrorists would come back and strafe the pile of corpses with bullets, determined none would be left alive. Yuval managed to stay very still and silent, even though her leg was badly wounded and the dead and the dying pressed down heavily on her. It was hard to breathe. Eight hours later, she was rescued, one of only 11 people in the shelter to survive. Eight hours when she knew the veil between life and death could be wrenched aside at any moment and ghosts were her close companions.
The trauma is hard to imagine. Yuval could be forgiven for retreating from the world and never trusting it again. Tragically, some who lived – girls who were raped and mutilated at the festival site – ended up in psychiatric units. Survivors’ guilt could be too hard to bear. A year after the massacre, Shirel Golan, aged 22, died by her own hand at home. Shirel’s family said she had found media misinformation about the barbaric atrocities, even downright denial and mockery of what had taken place, extremely distressing. “She is lying through her teeth and reading a script,” said one reply to a young girl’s account of her ordeal.
Yuval Raphael defied the haters and did something remarkable. Although she had always known she had a good voice, she didn’t begin a professional singing career until after the attack. At the Eurovision Song Contest a fortnight ago, she was Israel’s entry, delivering a knockout performance of a hauntingly beautiful ballad, New Day Will Rise. Still with shrapnel in her leg. “I wished for myself to be happy and to really understand the gift that I had been given, and that’s to live,” she told one journalist.
Graham Norton, the BBC’s commentator for Eurovision, said nothing about the nightmare Yuval had lived through, although you can guarantee a British entry who had hurt his big toe in a tobogganing accident would doubtless have been praised for his astonishing fortitude. “Israel, continues to be controversial,” Norton murmured when there were boos from the audience. Later, when Yuval won the popular vote by a landslide (coming second overall to Austria) Norton quipped: “Organisers breathing a sigh of relief they’re not faced with a Tel Aviv final next year.”
That was how the resurrection of a young woman who survived a massacre by some of the world’s most evil men was covered by the BBC.
The shabby treatment of Yuval came back to me on Monday morning when I listened to Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, talking on the Today programme about the killing of 31 Palestinians at a US-backed aid hub in Gaza. The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) denied it had fired on civilians and an Israeli government spokesman claimed rumours were circulated by “bad faith actors”. Then, on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blasted the BBC over its reporting, saying it constantly took Hamas’s word as “total truth”.
While it’s hard to know for certain, it seemed perfectly possible that Hamas, furious about losing control over the aid, a lucrative Mafia-like arrangement which it enjoyed when UNWRA (United Nations relief agency – accused of being riddled with corruption) had a monopoly, needed a quick propaganda win to cast doubt over the new American system.
But Bowen had other ideas. First he said that “information I’ve been getting from medics” backed up what a British doctor had just told Today. Because UK medics based in Gaza are always reliable witnesses (and children are never, ever gravely injured or starved or murdered by Hamas to turn the international community against Israel). As is that UN bloke, Tom Fletcher, who, only recently, told the programme that “14,000 babies in Gaza will die in the next 48 hours” if Israel’s “egregious” action continues. Really? How was that horrifying statistic arrived at? BBC journalists apparently thought it was rude to press Mr Fletcher too hard. His appalling claim, made, he said, in the heat of a desperate situation, was swiftly debunked, but not before that disgraceful blood libel (a common anti-Semitic trope is that the Jews are baby killers) had travelled around the world. Astonishingly, Tom Fletcher, while admitting his language needed to be more precise in the future, doubled down on suggestions that aid was not being allowed in and it was a “war crime”.
“That many casualties,” continued Jeremy Bowen, “included shrapnel as well coming from shells... I think we have to assume that… the Israelis were shooting because that volume of casualties is the kind of volume Israelis only are able to inflict.”
Again, really? Why do we always “have to assume” the worst possible behaviour by the IDF when independent experts say they have inflicted historically low casualties for warfare in a built-up area. Not that all casualties aren’t dreadful and distressing (and 27 more Palestinians were tragically killed on Tuesday while waiting for aid to be distributed), but Allied forces inflicted worse when they drove the equally wicked Islamic State out of Iraq. President Obama ordered a siege of the city of Mosul because the terrorists had embedded themselves within civilian areas. There was a notable shortage of media outrage about the 10,000 civilian deaths because the world mainly agreed that the planet was a better place without those fundamentalist b------s in it.
Oh, and by the way, what possible motive would Israel have for shooting scores of civilians when it has a vested interest in proving those aid hubs can succeed?
Let’s not forget it was the BBC which reported that an explosion at Al-Ahli hospital simply must have been caused by Israel before overwhelming evidence emerged that a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket was responsible. Jeremy Bowen said he didn’t regret “one thing in my reporting, because I think I was measured throughout, I didn’t race to judgment.” When the interviewer pointed out that Bowen falsely reported that the hospital building was flattened, he said, “Oh, yeah, well, I got that wrong.” No biggie, Jeremy.
Not coincidentally, Monday’s Today programme also carried news of an attack on an event in Boulder, Colorado, which was raising awareness about the Israeli hostages. Twelve people were badly injured, some burned by Molotov cocktails including an elderly lady who had survived the Holocaust.
The appalling worldwide surge in anti-Semitism since October 7 2023 – including the recent murder of a young couple who worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington DC – is undoubtedly fuelled by grossly partisan reporting. A week ago there was a racially-motivated knife attack by a group of men on three Jewish boys at Hampstead Tube station; one lad ended up in hospital. More and more British Jews, among our most successful and patriotic citizens (I have never been to a Jewish event where they didn’t sing God Save the King), are being driven out of the UK. What on earth must they think when they hear Jeremy Bowen’s palpable contempt for Israel – it’s so bad I can’t bear to listen any more. And much of other BBC reporting is barely disguised anti-Semitism.
They say the devil has all the best tunes and Hamas has played the media like a violin. Surely very little by the way of civilised conduct is to be expected from men who strangled the tiny Bibas brothers, baby Kfir and toddler Ariel, with their bare hands. Monsters who streamed over the border and killed nearly all the young women soldiers at the border observation station; most of their bodies so savagely mutilated in acts of sexual rage and depravity what remained of them was unfit to be shown to their grieving parents. Yet the Western media, and a large proportion of the educated liberal world, including the BBC, has been entirely captured by this extremist Islamist group which would murder in cold blood every value, every enlightened idea, every uncovered woman, every gay person, they hold dear.
All of the sane Muslim states have banned the crazies, knowing what destruction they wreak, how murderous their creed, how anti-life they are. “Hamas are terrorists” – a message on a placard that my friend from Our Fight: For Israel Against Anti-Semitism, Mark Birbeck, has been arrested for even holding in central London. A truth – Hamas are terrorists – that the BBC will still not speak.
You know, I took some comfort from Yuval Raphael’s amazing win in the Eurovision popular vote. Despite the relentless propaganda, a vast number of viewers across the continent decided to support New Day Will Rise and Israel’s entry.
“Be quiet,” he replied. “Yuvali, my daughter. Yuvali, breathe deep. Hide. Play dead.”
Hamas massacred 40 beautiful young people in that roadside shelter, and their bodies protected Yuval, so that one day she would sing. And the death-cult shall have no dominion, and they will not win. Must never win.
I was in southern Israel last September, close to the border with Gaza, researching an article on the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas massacres. Our driver was taking us along Route 232, now known as the “Road of Death” since so many people were murdered there. A line of pensioners waiting patiently for a bus were machine-gunned, I was told. We passed a number of small roadside shelters called meguniots which normally offer protection for civilians from incoming rockets. Young partygoers fleeing the Nova music festival hid in these concrete bunkers when they came across dozens of terrorists on the broad highway through the desert.
We stopped at one and I stepped inside. Incredibly narrow and cramped, no bigger than a garden shed, the space had been turned into a shrine with flickering tea lights, photographs of the beautiful boys and girls who breathed their last in there, and QR codes that allowed you to download individual stories. “We are in a horror movie,” a girl’s voice said. “Many people are dead, we are shot in the legs, please help,” yelped a boy. He didn’t make it.
Up to 50 children were packed closely together in that meguniot. Hamas threw grenades in, killing several of them instantly. The injured groaned while those who were still OK made whispered calls to their parents and the police begging for help. Yuval Raphael managed to reach her father. In a recording, you can hear her crying: “Dad, lots of people are dead. Send the police here. Please Dad, send the police, it’s urgent... they’re crushing me.”
“Be quiet,” he replied. “Yuvali, my daughter. Yuvali, breathe deep. Hide. Play dead.”
“Bye,” the 23-year-old said, thinking that was the last time she’d hear his voice.
Yuval Raphael was one of the lucky ones, if anything which happened that pitch-dark day can be called good fortune. The bodies of her friends, and people she’d only just met, fell on her. Every so often, the terrorists would come back and strafe the pile of corpses with bullets, determined none would be left alive. Yuval managed to stay very still and silent, even though her leg was badly wounded and the dead and the dying pressed down heavily on her. It was hard to breathe. Eight hours later, she was rescued, one of only 11 people in the shelter to survive. Eight hours when she knew the veil between life and death could be wrenched aside at any moment and ghosts were her close companions.
The trauma is hard to imagine. Yuval could be forgiven for retreating from the world and never trusting it again. Tragically, some who lived – girls who were raped and mutilated at the festival site – ended up in psychiatric units. Survivors’ guilt could be too hard to bear. A year after the massacre, Shirel Golan, aged 22, died by her own hand at home. Shirel’s family said she had found media misinformation about the barbaric atrocities, even downright denial and mockery of what had taken place, extremely distressing. “She is lying through her teeth and reading a script,” said one reply to a young girl’s account of her ordeal.
Yuval Raphael defied the haters and did something remarkable. Although she had always known she had a good voice, she didn’t begin a professional singing career until after the attack. At the Eurovision Song Contest a fortnight ago, she was Israel’s entry, delivering a knockout performance of a hauntingly beautiful ballad, New Day Will Rise. Still with shrapnel in her leg. “I wished for myself to be happy and to really understand the gift that I had been given, and that’s to live,” she told one journalist.
Graham Norton, the BBC’s commentator for Eurovision, said nothing about the nightmare Yuval had lived through, although you can guarantee a British entry who had hurt his big toe in a tobogganing accident would doubtless have been praised for his astonishing fortitude. “Israel, continues to be controversial,” Norton murmured when there were boos from the audience. Later, when Yuval won the popular vote by a landslide (coming second overall to Austria) Norton quipped: “Organisers breathing a sigh of relief they’re not faced with a Tel Aviv final next year.”
That was how the resurrection of a young woman who survived a massacre by some of the world’s most evil men was covered by the BBC.
The shabby treatment of Yuval came back to me on Monday morning when I listened to Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, talking on the Today programme about the killing of 31 Palestinians at a US-backed aid hub in Gaza. The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) denied it had fired on civilians and an Israeli government spokesman claimed rumours were circulated by “bad faith actors”. Then, on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blasted the BBC over its reporting, saying it constantly took Hamas’s word as “total truth”.
While it’s hard to know for certain, it seemed perfectly possible that Hamas, furious about losing control over the aid, a lucrative Mafia-like arrangement which it enjoyed when UNWRA (United Nations relief agency – accused of being riddled with corruption) had a monopoly, needed a quick propaganda win to cast doubt over the new American system.
But Bowen had other ideas. First he said that “information I’ve been getting from medics” backed up what a British doctor had just told Today. Because UK medics based in Gaza are always reliable witnesses (and children are never, ever gravely injured or starved or murdered by Hamas to turn the international community against Israel). As is that UN bloke, Tom Fletcher, who, only recently, told the programme that “14,000 babies in Gaza will die in the next 48 hours” if Israel’s “egregious” action continues. Really? How was that horrifying statistic arrived at? BBC journalists apparently thought it was rude to press Mr Fletcher too hard. His appalling claim, made, he said, in the heat of a desperate situation, was swiftly debunked, but not before that disgraceful blood libel (a common anti-Semitic trope is that the Jews are baby killers) had travelled around the world. Astonishingly, Tom Fletcher, while admitting his language needed to be more precise in the future, doubled down on suggestions that aid was not being allowed in and it was a “war crime”.
“That many casualties,” continued Jeremy Bowen, “included shrapnel as well coming from shells... I think we have to assume that… the Israelis were shooting because that volume of casualties is the kind of volume Israelis only are able to inflict.”
Again, really? Why do we always “have to assume” the worst possible behaviour by the IDF when independent experts say they have inflicted historically low casualties for warfare in a built-up area. Not that all casualties aren’t dreadful and distressing (and 27 more Palestinians were tragically killed on Tuesday while waiting for aid to be distributed), but Allied forces inflicted worse when they drove the equally wicked Islamic State out of Iraq. President Obama ordered a siege of the city of Mosul because the terrorists had embedded themselves within civilian areas. There was a notable shortage of media outrage about the 10,000 civilian deaths because the world mainly agreed that the planet was a better place without those fundamentalist b------s in it.
Oh, and by the way, what possible motive would Israel have for shooting scores of civilians when it has a vested interest in proving those aid hubs can succeed?
Let’s not forget it was the BBC which reported that an explosion at Al-Ahli hospital simply must have been caused by Israel before overwhelming evidence emerged that a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket was responsible. Jeremy Bowen said he didn’t regret “one thing in my reporting, because I think I was measured throughout, I didn’t race to judgment.” When the interviewer pointed out that Bowen falsely reported that the hospital building was flattened, he said, “Oh, yeah, well, I got that wrong.” No biggie, Jeremy.
Not coincidentally, Monday’s Today programme also carried news of an attack on an event in Boulder, Colorado, which was raising awareness about the Israeli hostages. Twelve people were badly injured, some burned by Molotov cocktails including an elderly lady who had survived the Holocaust.
The appalling worldwide surge in anti-Semitism since October 7 2023 – including the recent murder of a young couple who worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington DC – is undoubtedly fuelled by grossly partisan reporting. A week ago there was a racially-motivated knife attack by a group of men on three Jewish boys at Hampstead Tube station; one lad ended up in hospital. More and more British Jews, among our most successful and patriotic citizens (I have never been to a Jewish event where they didn’t sing God Save the King), are being driven out of the UK. What on earth must they think when they hear Jeremy Bowen’s palpable contempt for Israel – it’s so bad I can’t bear to listen any more. And much of other BBC reporting is barely disguised anti-Semitism.
They say the devil has all the best tunes and Hamas has played the media like a violin. Surely very little by the way of civilised conduct is to be expected from men who strangled the tiny Bibas brothers, baby Kfir and toddler Ariel, with their bare hands. Monsters who streamed over the border and killed nearly all the young women soldiers at the border observation station; most of their bodies so savagely mutilated in acts of sexual rage and depravity what remained of them was unfit to be shown to their grieving parents. Yet the Western media, and a large proportion of the educated liberal world, including the BBC, has been entirely captured by this extremist Islamist group which would murder in cold blood every value, every enlightened idea, every uncovered woman, every gay person, they hold dear.
All of the sane Muslim states have banned the crazies, knowing what destruction they wreak, how murderous their creed, how anti-life they are. “Hamas are terrorists” – a message on a placard that my friend from Our Fight: For Israel Against Anti-Semitism, Mark Birbeck, has been arrested for even holding in central London. A truth – Hamas are terrorists – that the BBC will still not speak.
You know, I took some comfort from Yuval Raphael’s amazing win in the Eurovision popular vote. Despite the relentless propaganda, a vast number of viewers across the continent decided to support New Day Will Rise and Israel’s entry.
“Be quiet,” he replied. “Yuvali, my daughter. Yuvali, breathe deep. Hide. Play dead.”
Hamas massacred 40 beautiful young people in that roadside shelter, and their bodies protected Yuval, so that one day she would sing. And the death-cult shall have no dominion, and they will not win. Must never win.