BBC HELPED HAMAS LIE ABOUT ISRAEL REPORT SAYS
The BBC’s Arabic news service chose to “minimise Israeli suffering” in the war in Gaza so it could “paint Israel as the aggressor”, according to an internal report by a whistleblower.
Allegations made against Israel were “raced to air” without adequate checks, the memo says, suggesting either carelessness or “a desire always to believe the worst about Israel”.
BBC Arabic, which is funded partly by a grant from the Foreign Office, gave large amounts of space to statements from Hamas, making its editorial slant “considerably different” to the main BBC website even though it is supposed to reflect the same values, managers were warned.
The BBC also gave “unjustifiable weight” to Hamas claims about the death toll in Gaza, which are widely accepted to have been exaggerated for propaganda purposes, and incorrectly claimed the International Court of Justice had ruled that genocide was taking place.
Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, said it was now clear that the BBC was “not safe” in the hands of its senior managers and they should “hang their heads in shame and resign”.
In an article for The Telegraph, he said: “Having made such serious and misleading journalistic errors, BBC executives chose to hide them from the public rather than correct the record.
“Protecting the BBC’s reputation came before the duties and principles enshrined in the BBC’s Charter obligations.”
He added: “That the BBC has helped to push Hamas lies around the world and fuelled anti-Semitism at home cannot now be in doubt.”
The BBC was plunged into crisis on Monday when The Telegraph disclosed that a Panorama documentary doctored a speech by Donald Trump which made it look as though he had incited the Capitol Hill riots.
As a result, the BBC is facing questions over trust, with Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, and the broadcasting regulator Ofcom facing growing calls to launch an inquiry into alleged BBC bias.
Concerns about coverage of the war in Gaza were raised in the same 19-page letter to the BBC Board that highlighted the “manifestly misleading” Trump documentary.
Michael Prescott, who until June was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC), was so appalled by the BBC’s lack of action over multiple instances of bias that he wrote a devastating memo that was sent to all BBC Board members and is now circulating in government departments.
In a copy of the letter seen by The Telegraph, he says that BBC Arabic gave a platform to journalists who had made extreme anti-Semitic comments.
One man who said Jews should be burned “as Hitler did” appeared as a guest on BBC Arabic 244 times in 18 months.
Another man who described Israelis as less than human and Jews as “devils” appeared 522 times in the same period.
Earlier this year, BBC Two broadcast a documentary called Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone which it later admitted was narrated by the son of a Hamas official. The broadcasting regulator Ofcom found that the film was “materially misleading” and ordered the BBC to broadcast a statement with the findings. The film was also removed from iPlayer.
Despite years of complaints about the BBC’s reporting of the Gaza conflict “there is no sign of an open admission” by managers about “systemic problems” within BBC Arabic, Mr Prescott said in his memo.
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| Internal memo sent to BBC managers |
BBC Arabic, which is part of the World Service, is funded mainly through the licence fee, but also receives support from the Foreign Office through its World2020 programme.
The Government regards BBC Arabic, and the World Service as a whole, as having a “crucial role in supporting UK soft power and countering harmful disinformation”, according to a statement in the House of Lords in 2023.
Mr Prescott’s memo casts serious doubt on whether BBC Arabic is fulfilling its anti-disinformation role.
The memo said there was “critically different treatment” between the main BBC news website and BBC Arabic of a rocket attack on a football game in the village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, on Israel’s border with Lebanon, in July 2024 that claimed the lives of nine children.
The English language version of the report included a denial by the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah that it was responsible for the rocket strike but included evidence that it had bombed other sites nearby.
BBC Arabic made no mention of the other rocket attacks and gave greater prominence to Hezbollah’s denials, while making no reference to the deaths of children.
The next day it followed up with a report about claims that Israel faked the attack. Mr Prescott wrote: “It is hard to conclude anything other than that BBC Arabic’s story treatment was designed to minimise Israeli suffering and paint Israel as the aggressor.”
In July 2024 a senior news editor from the BBC World Service carried out an internal review of BBC Arabic which did not find any editorial “red flags”.
The EGSC found this surprising, so it commissioned its own review by David Grossman, its senior editorial adviser, who looked at a sample of five months of coverage from May to October 2024, covering 535 articles on the English language website and 523 on BBC Arabic.
He delivered a report to the committee on Jan 16 this year, “which exposed stark differences in the way important stories had been handled” by the two websites, according to Mr Prescott’s memo.
He found that the main BBC website had 19 separate stories about the Israeli hostages, while BBC Arabic had none. There were four articles critical of Hamas on the main website and none on BBC Arabic, but every article critical of Israel that appeared on the main website was replicated by BBC Arabic.
Individual stories were also covered in radically different ways by the two different arms of the BBC.
The English language website covered the story of Fawzia Sido, a Yazidi woman from northern Iraq who was kidnapped by Islamic State aged 11, sold as a sex slave and trafficked to Gaza. She was rescued by Israeli soldiers aged 21 after her captor, a Palestinian member of Hamas, was killed. She then returned to Iraq to be reunited with her family.
BBC Arabic ran a story about her as well, but its version was headlined: “Israel says ‘Yazidi prisoner returned to Iraq after 10 years in Gaza,’ Hamas tells BBC ‘Israel narrative is fabricated.”
On the BBC Arabic version, the original story was followed by a 582-word statement from Hamas, longer than the story itself, disputing the victim’s version of events.
There were also major differences in stories about an attack by Hamas on Oct 1 2024 which killed seven Israeli civilians in Jaffa.
The English version reported how the civilians were killed on a train and railway platform, but the Arabic version presented the attack as a military operation with no mention of the civilian victims.
One “very experienced person” who attended the EGSC meeting at which Mr Grossman’s review was presented described it as the most “extraordinary paper” she had ever seen.
Mr Prescott added: “It should have prompted urgent action by the Executive but it did not.”
He said there was no sign of an admission by BBC executives about the “systemic problems within BBC Arabic”.
The memo revealed that Jonathan Munro, the senior controller of BBC news content, responded to Mr Grossman’s review by saying BBC Arabic’s reporters were an “unrivalled source of knowledge and editorial content for the wider BBC” and had delivered “exceptional journalism”.
Mr Munro dismissed the concerns about individual stories, and said the high prominence given to Hamas statements “helps understanding of what Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza may be hearing”.
He also boasted that BBC Arabic was “almost as trusted as Al Jazeera”. Mr Prescott noted: “Is Al Jazeera the new gold standard the BBC wants to aspire to? All this is to entirely miss the main reasons for having a taxpayer funded World Service – to provide impartial news coverage and to reflect British values on the world stage.”
Al Jazeera has been accused of censoring coverage of the ruling regime in Qatar, where it is based, and its office in Ramallah on the West Bank in Israel was closed down last year by Israel on the grounds that it was a threat to national security.
How the BBC swallowed Hamas propaganda
An internal review of the BBC’s reporting on the death toll in Gaza concluded that the BBC had given “unjustifiable weight” to highly disputed Hamas figures.
In July 2024 the EGSC received the report, which was commissioned after the United Nations revised down its figures for the percentage of the dead who were women and children.
Despite growing concerns about the reliability of data coming out of Hamas-run Gaza, the BBC and the UN had originally reported that 70 per cent of all those killed in Gaza were women and children. The UN later revised this down to 52 per cent.
The internal report said the BBC had given too much credence to the 70 per cent claim for too long, “even though concerns about its credibility were well known”.
Another concern involved the reporting of mass graves in Gaza. In April 2024 the BBC reported on a mass grave found at Nasser hospital and in June 2024 on a mass grave at Al Shifa hospital.
The BBC’s reports gave a “strong implication…that Israeli forces had buried thousands of bodies at both sites prior to withdrawing from the area”, according to the internal review.
In fact, “the most likely explanation was that the graves at both hospitals were dug by Palestinians and the people buried there had died or been killed prior to the arrival of Israeli ground forces”, according to the letter written by Mr Prescott.
The BBC had carried reports of the bodies being found with their hands tied, with evidence of summary executions and torture. But the internal report noted there was “no independent corroboration” of this, and that the source of the mass graves stories was the Hamas-run Gaza Civil Defence Agency.
The BBC had reported extensively on Palestinians digging those same mass graves at the time they were created, and the same journalists reported on the discovery of the mass graves and apparent evidence of war crimes.
Evidence was presented to BBC executives of how badly the broadcaster had got the story wrong, “but it remains unclear what measures were taken” as a result, Mr Prescott’s letter said.
Yet another error occurred regarding a claim that 14,000 babies were at risk of starving to death in 48 hours. It was originally made by UN official Tom Fletcher in May this year during Israel’s aid blockade, but it quickly became clear that the correct figure was 14,000 children being at risk over the course of a year.
The BBC corrected its online articles but the false claim was still put to Israel’s UN ambassador on Newsnight later the same day.
The same programme also featured images of a baby said to be in need of specialist formula milk because of allergies and a birth defect. In fact, the baby in question had received the specialist formula a week earlier and had been discharged from hospital, as the BBC knew, but none of that was mentioned in the programme.
On another occasion the BBC gave extensive coverage to a letter signed by 600 lawyers that argued the UK Government was breaching international law by selling arms to Israel. A second letter, signed by 1,000 lawyers and arguing the opposite was true, was given minimal coverage.
An internal review of coverage of the war also flagged up the description in one BBC report of Hamas tunnels being used to “move goods and people”. The author of the review said that by omitting to mention what the tunnels were really for, the story laid the BBC open to the charge of “aiming to in some way sanitise Hamas’s terror infrastructure”.
Foot dragging over incorrect genocide claim
The BBC repeatedly reported that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ruled in January 2024 that there was a “plausible case of genocide” in Gaza.
It was mentioned by Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, among others, and on Newsnight and various television and radio reports.
Joan Donoghue, the former ICJ president, told the BBC’s HardTalk programme that the media had widely misinterpreted its findings and it was not correct to say the ICJ had found a plausible case of genocide.
An internal BBC review into the matter found that the ICJ’s ruling “is very clear and explicitly states that the court is not making any determination on the merits” of claims of genocide, but only on whether what was being alleged was covered by the genocide convention.
Mr Prescott said in his letter: “The ICJ report runs to just 26 pages and is written in non-technical language. Had no BBC reporter troubled themselves to read it?”
It took months for the BBC to issue a clarification.
Mr Prescott wrote: “The BBC is prone to downplaying criticism by saying it receives similar numbers of complaints from both sides. Looking at the evidence set out above, it seems very hard for any pro-Palestinian observers to make a compelling case that the BBC has a pro-Israel bias.”
In April 2025, The Telegraph reported that BBC Arabic had given a regular platform to a pro-Hamas journalist called Samer Elzaenen, who had said online that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did”.
The Telegraph’s article, which said Elzaenen had appeared on the channel a dozen times, prompted an internal review into BBC Arabic which revealed the true number was far more extensive.
Between November 2023 and April 2025 Elzaenen appeared 244 times on BBC Arabic.
In a Facebook post in July 2022 he said: “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything.”
In May 2011 he said on Facebook: “My message to the Zionist Jews: we are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.”
He has praised more than 30 separate attacks against Jewish civilians in Israel, describing the killers as heroes and martyrs.
Ahmed Qannan, another BBC Arabic regular, described a 26-year-old Palestinian who killed four Israeli civilians and a police officer in March 2022 as a “hero”. Writing on Facebook in response to a friend who said “we want to see some throats cut”, Qannan wrote: “Don’t give up on your ambition.”
The BBC’s internal review found he had appeared on BBC Arabic 217 times in the 14 months to April 2025.
Ahmed Alagha, who described Israelis as less than human and Jews as “devils”, appeared on BBC Arabic 522 times between November 2023 and April 2025, the BBC’s internal review found.
The broadcaster previously responded to the individual cases mentioned, saying they were not BBC members of staff and the social media posts did not reflect its views. There is no place for anti-Semitism on BBC services, a spokesman said.
The corporation repeated this on Tuesday night, adding that Alagha was not a member of BBC staff and that “we will not be using him as a contributor in this way again.”
Earlier this year Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, called for wholesale reform of BBC Arabic, which prompted the BBC to downplay the contributions of the freelancers, even describing them as “eyewitnesses”.
In April the BBC said in response to the Telegraph’s story: “We hear from a range of eyewitness accounts from the [Gaza] strip.” The BBC also said of Elzaenen and Qannan: “These are not BBC members of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team.”
In a letter to the BBC Board, Mr Prescott, who was until June an independent member of the EGSC, said: “Most viewers would consider hundreds of appearances on the BBC, reporting on developments, to amount to a journalist being almost a part of the corporation’s reporting team.”
A BBC spokesman said: “While we don’t comment on leaked documents, when the BBC receives feedback it takes it seriously and considers it carefully.
“With regard to BBC News Arabic, where mistakes have been made or errors have occurred we have acknowledged them at the time and taken action.
“We have also previously acknowledged that certain contributors should not have been used and have improved our processes to avoid a repeat of this.”
The BBC bias dossier
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