The Foreign Ministry on Thursday thanked the BBC for changing an incendiary anti-Israel headline that reported the death of a pregnant Gaza woman and her toddler in an Israeli airstrike without any mention of the hundreds of rockets Hamas has fired at Israeli civilian communities since Wednesday night, wounding over 20.
The British Broadcasting Corporation tweeted a picture of plumes of smoke from an airstrike in Gaza, captioned "Israeli air strikes 'kill pregnant woman and baby,'" linked to a BBC story on the escalating violence.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon responded to the BBC tweet and called the title "a deliberate misrepresentation of reality (that's the polite equivalent of a LIE)."
"Israelis were targeted by Hamas and [the] IDF acts to protect them," Nahshon wrote, demanding that the BBC change its headline "immediately."
Later Thursday Nahshon thanked BBC World for deleting the "misleading" tweet and "reporting on the facts."
Thursday's tweets over contextless coverage of Palestinian casualties comes some two weeks after Nahshon blasted the BBC and American news network CNN for "biased coverage" of the tensions between Israel and Hamas-ruled Gaza.
After IDF Staff Sgt. Aviv Levi was killed by Palestinian sniper fire near the Gaza border, Israeli aircraft carried out heavy strikes on Hamas positions.
Nahshon took CNN and the BBC for merely stating that Levi had been "shot," as opposed to deliberately targeted by terrorists.
"You got it wrong and not for the first time … by misrepresenting the facts you manipulate against #Israel!" Nahshon tweeted at CNN.
The foreign ministry spokesman also retweeted a post by an Israeli adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) criticizing the BBC for reporting that Staff Sgt. Levi had been "killed by a gunshot," without any mention of Hamas.
