Abdullah Al-Yazouri, a 13-year-old boy living in the Gaza Strip, is a natural in front of the camera. In the BBC documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which first aired February 17, he and other youngsters guide viewers through wrecked buildings, rubble-strewn streets, and bloody, overflowing hospitals.
The film, which the network’s website proudly billed as a report on “four young people trying to survive the Israel-Hamas war as they hope for a ceasefire,” offers “a vivid and unflinching view of life in a warzone.” There are moments of levity, befitting a doc narrated by kids: We meet Renad, 10, who runs an online cooking channel on TikTok, conjuring up delicious dishes from whatever she and her sister can gather. Elsewhere, Rana, a young woman, has given birth prematurely to a baby girl.
For the most part, though, the film is grim—and some of the footage is disturbing. A surgeon tries to save the injured arm of a child on the operating table. Soon after, he passes the bloody, amputated limb to a colleague.
The message could not be clearer: Such is the horror inflicted by the Yehud—the Arabic word for Jew, which is spoken by Palestinians in the film, but sanitized in the BBC’s translation as Israeli, per the network’s long-standing practice.
Yet now it is the BBC that’s under fire over the documentary’s fishy sources and methods. It turns out that Al-Yazouri was anything but a random child-journalist. He is the son of Dr. Ayman Alyazouri, a deputy minister in the Hamas government. It took an investigation by David Collier, a British media researcher and activist who describes himself as “100 percent Zionist,” to bring this fact to light. Though obviously pertinent information, it was not disclosed to viewers.