The Free Press
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.
The ensuing uproar extended across Britain’s political spectrum and forced the BBC first to issue a correction and then to remove the film from broadcast “for further due diligence.” Lisa Nandy, the Labour government’s culture secretary, has said she will demand answers about the film from BBC bosses. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative opposition, has written a letter to Tim Davie, the beleaguered BBC director general, demanding “a full independent enquiry” into both the Gaza film and “wider allegations of systemic BBC bias against Israel.”
Such a review would be overdue. Danny Cohen, a former director of BBC television and a consistent informed critic of the organization, told me the problem is deep-rooted and institutional. “The BBC may try and present this as an isolated incident, but it’s really not,” he said. “It forms part of a systemic pattern of bias and misrepresentation that we have seen since the October 7 attacks. There is a lot of groupthink, which presents Israel as a postcolonial state. The degree of focus that they place on Israel is very different to any other country.”
In 2004, Malcolm Balen, a senior BBC journalist, was commissioned by former BBC news chief Richard Sambrook to compile a lengthy report about its coverage of the Middle East. This was in response to sustained complaints of anti-Israel bias. Balen completed the report but it has never been released. The BBC spent hundreds of thousands of pounds fighting off lawsuits from those who wanted it published. The Beeb argued that, as an internal document held for journalistic purposes, the report was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. In February 2012, the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruled in the BBC’s favor.
Much of the problem, said Cohen, stems from the BBC’s Arabic language service, some of whose reporters are especially biased against Israel. Those attitudes then percolate into the main newsroom and influence coverage by the English services, he argues. In the five months following the October 7 attacks, the BBC Arabic Service made 80 corrections of its coverage, an average of one every other day. Thirty corrections were due to reports that described towns and communities inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders as “settlements.” On three occasions BBC Arabic described Hamas and Hezbollah—both designated terror groups under British law—as “the resistance,” according to a report by CAMERA, the pro-Israel media monitoring group. “BBC bosses absolutely know that there is a systemic problem of bias at BBC Arabic,” said Cohen, “but the fact that they have not admitted it is just pure gaslighting of the Jewish community.”
When an explosion occurred at the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on October 17, 2023, Jon Donnison, a former BBC correspondent in Gaza and the West Bank, quickly opined: “The Israeli military has been contacted for comment and they say they are investigating. But it’s hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike, or several air strikes, because when we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza we’ve never seen explosions of that scale.” Jeremy Bowen, the international editor, said on air that a missile strike had “flattened” the hospital. It was soon determined that casualties and damage—limited to the hospital’s parking area—had been caused by an errant terrorist rocket. Bowen admitted he had been wrong but added, “I don’t feel particularly bad about that.”
Donnison’s rush to judgment was perhaps predictable for a journalist who, in September 2011, had asked on Twitter: “Any thoughts on why jewish lobby so influential in US when BBC poll showed 45% of Americans support Pal #UN bid compared to 36% against?” Just last week, on February 22, 2025, Donnison, currently a BBC correspondent based in Britain, posted on X: “The propaganda efforts by both Hamas and Israel over the hostage releases are pretty nauseating,” drawing an equivalence between the dead babies and emaciated adults barely able to walk released by Hamas and the fit, well-fed—and lawfully convicted—terrorists released by Israel. The post caused so much revulsion and anger that Donnison took it down the next day, acknowledging that “it wasn’t appropriate. Sorry if it offended anyone as that wasn’t my intention.”
The lapses of How to Survive a Warzone are doubly shocking given that the film’s producers and the network itself must know the BBC is under a microscope. Its flaws include not only the lack of transparency about young Al-Yazouri’s father’s Hamas connection, but the inherently questionable decision to put children forward as reliable narrators (not to mention issues around safeguarding the children’s welfare and protecting against their exploitation). There was no disclaimer about the restrictions Hamas imposes on media in Gaza. It is impossible for such a program to have been filmed without Hamas’s support and approval. And then there is possible nonsequential editing. British journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti has shown that one child’s hair varies in length during what is ostensibly a single continuous scene.
What little we do know about the film’s methodology comes from an article on the BBC website—since removed—by Jamie Roberts, the independent British filmmaker who collaborated on the project with Yousef Hammash, a Gaza-born Palestinian, of London-based Hoyo Films. Roberts wrote that he and Hammash co-directed the film from London, using two local cameramen, who they directed via phone and WhatsApp. Roberts mentioned Israel’s restrictions on international journalists entering Gaza but not Abdullah’s connections to Hamas or Hamas’s censorship. Instead he presented the narratives as freely gathered. (Attempts to contact Hoyo Films were unsuccessful.)
As for the BBC, when controversy erupted it tried to blame Hoyo Films. On February 19, two days after the program premiered, the BBC added contextual detail to the film’s opening: “The narrator of this film is 13-year-old Abdullah. His father has worked as a deputy agriculture minister for the Hamas-run government in Gaza. The production team had full editorial control of filming with Abdullah.” An additional statement on the BBC website noted, “We followed all of our usual compliance procedures in the making of this film, but we had not been informed of this information by the producers when we complied and then broadcast the film.”
This “dog ate my homework” excuse, of course, raised more questions. If the BBC had followed all of its “compliance procedures,” how did senior executives—and films about such sensitive subjects as the war in Gaza get vetted by multiple editors—not know that the key narrator was the son of a Hamas minister?
“The BBC should have been on red alert for this kind of problem, because this was a documentary made over many weeks,” said a senior British television executive. “This is a hugely contentious subject and you would have thought that they would bend over backward to show their due diligence.”
Two days after adding this threadbare “correction,” the network finally decided it could no longer stand behind the documentary and withdrew it from broadcast.
This still-developing scandal might just be the biggest ever for the BBC involving its coverage of the Middle East, and one that could threaten the flow of funds upon which it depends. Badenoch has declared war on the BBC’s license fee, the mandatory annual payment of $214 that everyone in Britain who watches live TV pays. “I cannot see how my party could support the continuation of the current license fee–based system without serious action by the BBC management to prove the organization is committed to true impartiality,” she wrote to the BBC’s Davie.
The network and its apologists have deflected criticism in the past, claiming good-faith errors on the part of its journalists and executives—and bad faith on the part of its critics, inevitably branded, dismissively, as “Zionists” or “the Israel Lobby.” But public opinion in Britain might be changing. The grotesque scenes in Gaza attending the release of infant Israeli hostages’ remains have caused widespread revulsion even among those who do not usually pay attention to Middle East wars.
The news that “Auntie,” as the BBC is still affectionately known, had broadcast Hamas propaganda—using vulnerable children to do so—could prove a tipping point. Some at the broadcaster might be tempted to throw one or two executives under the bus, but that would be no substitute for a thorough scrub of decades’ worth of editorial attitudes. This is an institution that presumes to maintain BBC Verify, a 60-journalist unit devoted to countering “disinformation.” Maybe they should unleash it on themselves.
Adam LeBor is a journalist and novelist. His latest work of nonfiction is The Last Days of Budapest: The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital in World War II, forthcoming from PublicAffairs in April.