BBC in meltdown over Gaza coverage

Posted: 17th July 2025

This week, a BBC report found that a documentary about the lives of children in Gaza had breached editorial guidelines on accuracy.

“Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” followed the lives of four young Palestinians trying to survive Israel’s brutal onslaught and siege of Gaza. It also exposed Israeli war crimes, including attacks on doctors and healthcare institutions.

The BBC initially described the documentary as a “vivid and unflinching view of life in a warzone”, with 13-year-old narrator Abdullah asking viewers: “have you ever wondered what you’d do if your world was destroyed?”

But it was almost immediately removed from iPlayer amid complaints from pro-Israel groups – including Israeli state officials – and claims that the narrator’s father was a Hamas government official.

The BBC has now released its report into the incident, noting that “the failure to disclose in the programme the information about the narrator’s father’s position as Deputy Minister of Agriculture in the Hamas-run government… was a breach of the BBC’s Editorial guidelines”.

At the same time, there were no concerns that Abdullah’s “scripted contribution to the programme breached the BBC’s standards on due impartiality” or that his “family influenced the content of the programme in any way”.

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In other words, the BBC has not been able to produce any evidence that the documentary would have been any different had Abdullah not been the son of a scientist involved in agricultural policy in Gaza.

Yet the facts haven’t stopped UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy from weighing in.

In recent weeks, she has asked why nobody at the BBC was fired over the decision to air the documentary and even met with Israel’s ambassador in London Tzipi Hotovely to discuss “serious concerns about the failings” of the broadcaster.

For Nandy, what was truly “catastrophic” was the BBC’s decision to air the film rather than the scenes of children struggling to survive amid a UK-backed genocide.

However, the government’s efforts to haul the BBC over the coals for airing “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” have not distracted observers from the broadcaster’s systematic bias in favour of Israel.

Indeed, the Centre for Media Monitoring found just last month that the “BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality”, while presenters have shut down claims of “genocide” over 100 times while making no mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements.

“If the BBC is serious about looking into and signposting the connections of every contributor, shouldn’t we also be told when an Israeli guest has served in the military?”, asked former BBC journalist Karishma Patel.

“If the BBC is serious about including all relevant context, shouldn’t any mention of Netanyahu include reference to his International Criminal Court arrest warrant?”, she added.

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