A peculiar incident occurred this month at an Israeli army base in the Negev: a wild caracal – a desert feline native to the region – bit two Israeli soldiers. Though minor and medically insignificant, the episode subsequently found its way across BBC Arabic’s platforms: X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Within a couple of days, the BBC had published this story across its Arabic-language social media properties, giving it a visibility usually reserved for serious geopolitical events. Far from treating it as harmless filler, the framing and timing of the coverage encouraged a deluge of celebratory comments from Arabic-speaking users, who gleefully described the cat as a hero or a symbol of resistance. Remarkably, BBC Arabic returned to the story the next day, running another cycle largely focused on showcasing and linking to that very type of comment.
What did not receive this kind of attention from BBC Arabic was something else that happened in the same 24-hour window of the story being published: the shooting of
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