Was the BBC hoodwinked, biased or simply incompetent? The lack of fact-checking in the Gaza documentary raises troubling questions

19 February 2025, 13:51 | Updated: 19 February 2025, 13:56

I love the BBC, so it gives me no pleasure to criticise the institution that I know some people would like to see dismantled.

The 21st century is a “post-truth” digital world, exemplified by the Israel-Hamas conflict, which has seen many newsrooms misleading their audiences.

But surely the well-resourced BBC are better than that. We pay our license fee for them to be the gold standard, and often they are. Give them a domestic story, and they probably won’t struggle to verify identities or fact-check.

But since the October 7 attacks in Israel, the BBC has been accused of spreading anti-Israel propaganda. In the case of BBC Arabic, it was found to employ anti-Israel journalists and producers on the ground in both Gaza and Lebanon.

Channel 4 produced a popular, award-winning documentary called “Inside Gaza: Israel and Hamas at War.” So, who could blame the BBC for trying to replicate it with “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” their prime-time documentary?

The BBC used the same co-producer as the C4 documentary to run things from London, Yousef Hammash, an anti-Israel activist from Gaza. The other co-producer, Jamie Roberts, speaks no Arabic and is not a Middle East expert.

On the ground, two cameramen were used, one of who posted praise for Hamas’s massacre of families on October 7 2023. These were the people that the BBC trusted to create an accurate documentary about life in Gaza. The BBC claimed to have “full editorial control”, but that claim now looks highly questionable.

Research using Google or Facebook would have revealed the subject's previous press coverage and that the teenager Abdullah, who narrates the film, is the son of a senior Hamas minister and grandson of a Hamas founder. Did the Hamas-supporting cameraman who followed him for months not know who his family were?

There are thousands of journalists in Gaza, but Hamas control everything that comes out of the Gaza Strip. Almost everything reported is something Hamas would want viewers to know, including this documentary, but viewers are never informed of the unspoken contract between terrorist and journalist. The BBC’s argument that Abdullah's father had no input doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

This episode once again raises troubling questions about the BBC's coverage of the war in Gaza. An urgent investigation is needed to determine how these mistakes keep happening.

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Alex Hearn is co-director of Labour Against Antisemitism, newspaper columnist and speaker who is currently writing a book about antisemitism.

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