- BBC critics say documentary's removal reflects biased pro-Israel coverage since war began
- Scholars and media experts warn that censorship increases dehumanization of Palestinians
DUBAI: The BBC's decision to pull its documentary on Gaza has reignited a public debate over the broadcaster's pro-Israel bias in its coverage of the latest war and raised concerns about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby on the impartiality of Western media.
Last week, the broadcaster faced a backlash from pro-Israel supporters, prominent Jewish media figures and Israeli representatives in the UK government when it emerged that Abdullah al-Yazuri, the 14-year-old main narrator in the BBC Two documentary Gaza: How to Survive in a Warzone, is the son of Ayman al-Yazuri, a deputy agriculture minister who served in the Hamas government.
After the documentary was pulled from iPlayer, the BBC came under renewed criticism from academics, public figures and broadcasters who argued that the channel should have maintained its journalistic impartiality and independence.
Critics of the channel said the removal of the documentary, which provides a rare child's view of the devastating effects of the Gaza war, reflected the BBC's biased pro-Israel coverage since the start of the war, further exacerbating the dehumanisation of Palestinians and the marginalisation of their voices.
“The BBC should not have given in to pressure from pro-Israel groups and the British government, which should not have interfered,” Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, told Arab News.
“What's striking is the huge gap between how this documentary has been maliciously presented as Hamas propaganda and the reality of the film itself, which is a child's view of life in the war-torn Gaza Strip that doesn't get political but is a very human story about how Palestinian children survive day to day,” Doyle said.
The documentary, filmed over nine months in the run-up to the January ceasefire agreement, features three children among its main characters living amid the bombing and massive destruction caused by the war in Gaza.
The boy's family's links to a Hamas-run civil servant have attracted the attention of UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, who said she had raised “deep concerns” in a meeting with BBC Director-General Tim Davie and called on the channel to report “what happened and who knows when”.
Following an investigation, the BBC apologised on Thursday for “serious shortcomings” in the making of the documentary.
The company said it had “no plans” to broadcast the film again in its current form, despite pleas from 500 media professionals and filmmakers including Gary Lineker and Juliet Stevenson for the channel to resume showing the documentary, calling it “an essential piece of journalism” that “amplifies voices that are too often silenced”.
Warning of “racist assumptions”, they said: “Using family groups as a weapon to discredit a child's testimony is unethical and dangerous.”
Doyle called on the BBC to review its decision “very independently, without outside interference”.
He said the broadcaster's actions made “illegal” work that “humanizes Palestinians and treats Palestinian children as people with rights, aspirations, hopes and fears.”
BBC critics say it also reinforces a dominant narrative that militarises Palestinians and associates them with armed groups.
Lorely Khan-Herrera, a lecturer in global media and digital culture at SOAS, University of London, said condemning the documentary as a Hamas-influenced film did not mean that anyone working in the government was necessarily a member of its armed wing.
Hamas is classified as a terrorist organisation in the UK, US and Europe.
“Ayman Al-Yazuri is a mid-level bureaucrat who was educated in the UK. I don't think it's fair to make the children guilty by association, which further feeds the narrative of linking all Palestinians in Gaza to Hamas and criminalising Palestinian men and stripping them of their citizenship status,” Khan-Herrera told Arab News.
The first five minutes of the documentary show Palestinians denouncing Hamas and its late leader Yahya Sinwar while fleeing bombings.
“The documentary shows children traumatized by the war and actively denouncing Hamas. It challenges the current discourse coming from Israel and its supporters in the West, which associates everyone in Gaza with Hamas and therefore makes them targeted terrorists,” said Khan-Herrera.
She added: “Of the few political statements that were made in the documentary, all of them were directed against Hamas.”
More seriously, Khan-Herrera noted, by giving in to pro-Israel pressure, the BBC is undermining its credibility as the independent institution it claims to be and calling into question the idea of independence from government that it wants the public to believe.
Asked by Arab News to comment, a BBC spokesman pointed to the channel's statement on Friday that the investigation was ongoing.
The BBC, like other Western media, faces growing accusations that its reporting on the Gaza war favours Israeli and its allies over Palestinian voices.
However, debates about the dominance of Israeli rhetoric in Western media during conflicts with the Palestinians are not new.
A groundbreaking 2011 study by Greg Philo and Mike Berry, More Bad News from Israel, showed how the BBC's editorial team faced constant pressure and scrutiny when covering events in Israel and Palestine, making it difficult to clearly convey the Palestinian point of view.
“Pressure from organized public relations, lobbying and systematic criticism, as well as the privileged position of Israeli viewpoints by political and public figures, can influence the climate in which journalists operate,” the authors argue.
In November, The Independent reported that more than 100 BBC staff had written to Davy and director general Deborah Turness accusing the channel of repeating and failing to challenge claims by Israeli officials that “systematically dehumanise Palestinians”, sidelining the Palestinian point of view and failing to place the war in the wider context of the 76-year occupation and the strict 18-year blockade of Gaza.
Among the problems noted by staff were “dehumanizing and misleading headlines” that erase Israel’s responsibility, such as “6-year-old Hind Rajab found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help,” attributed to an article about a 6-year-old girl who was shot dead by Israeli forces in Gaza in January 2024.
Other concerns included coverage omissions, such as the lack of live coverage of South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice on January 11, but the decision to live-stream Israel's defense the following day.
A month later, The Independent's report was followed by an article titled “The BBC's civil war in Gaza” published on the Drop Site, an investigative news platform, in which 13 BBC journalists took part, claiming that their objections to biased reporting had been ignored.
The 9,000-word article cites an analysis that found a “profound imbalance” in the way the channel covered Palestinian and Israeli deaths, and argues that Israeli casualties were more humane.
It also details instances of bias, including the use of stronger terms such as “massacre,” “slaughter,” or “atrocities” to describe Hamas’ crimes, while failing to use the same terms to describe Israel’s crackdown in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 46,000 people, most of them women and children.
At the time, the BBC rejected accusations of bias and defended its coverage, insisting it “strives to fulfil its duty to provide the best possible and impartial news”.
A BBC spokesman said at the time: “We are very clear to our viewers about the restrictions placed on our reporting, including no access to Gaza and limited access to some areas of Lebanon, and our ongoing efforts to get reporters into these areas.”
Numerous academic studies have reviewed previous wars between Palestine and Israel, most of which have found a disproportionate focus on the Israeli point of view while downplaying Palestinian suffering.
Rather, the recent BBC documentary shared with Western audiences a rare perspective that humanised the suffering of Palestinian children, says Khan-Herrera.
“It shows that the Palestinians, even under occupation, even under constant military attacks, want to live a normal life. It showed that despite all the difficulties and problems that the Palestinians face, they are a resourceful people and continue to try to live a normal life as best they can,” she said.
