Two senior executives at the British public-service broadcaster BBC resigned after an internal reviewer revealed serious and obvious bias in the news coverage of the war in Gaza.
It was the experienced journalist Michael Prescott, who, until June 2025 was an independent adviser to the BBC’s editorial management, who described how BBC Arabic gave extensive space to the terror group Hamas’s views in its Gaza reporting.
As early as last summer, five months of news coverage of the war in Gaza on English-language BBC News and on BBC Arabic was examined.
It turned out that BBC Arabic did not publish any of the BBC’s articles about the hostages from the BBC News website but did publish all critical articles about Israel.
BBC News had three times as many articles about Israeli suffering. BBC Arabic had no articles about the horrors the hostages faced, about traumatised Israeli communities, about Hamas and Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on Israeli residential areas, or about rising antisemitism.
There were also no articles criticising Hamas on BBC Arabic and only four on the English-language service.
BBC News reported on a Yazidi woman who was rescued by Israeli soldiers after ten years as a sex slave in Iraq, where she had been kidnapped, drugged, raped, and “sold” to an ISIS fighter at the age of just 11. She managed to escape to Gaza with support from the US and Iraq. When BBC Arabic published the news, Hamas was allowed to tell BBC that Israel’s story was fabricated in a 582-word statement disputing the woman’s history.
Terror attack became a ‘military operation’
Even a Hamas terror attack in October 2024 that killed seven Israeli civilians in Jaffa was turned by BBC Arabic into a military operation without mentioning the victims. A BBC News report about four hostages killed in Gaza in June 2024 was dismissed in a BBC Arabic article that focused on Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel.
Hezbollah’s bombing of a football match in the Golan Heights on 27 July 2024 in which nine children died was dismissed with the claim that there was no evidence linking Hezbollah to the bombing of a nearby military facility; instead BBC Arabic published the terror group’s denials. The headline said “Israelis” were killed in the attack, not children. A later article contained unfounded claims from Iran and Syria that Israel had faked the attack as a pretext to attack Hezbollah.
BBC Arabic’s articles were designed to minimise Israeli suffering and portray Israel as the aggressor. Despite last summer’s criticism, there are no signs of open acknowledgment from management of systemic problems within BBC Arabic, Michael Prescott notes. He also describes how BBC hires “journalists” in Gaza with antisemitic views who support Hamas. He mentioned how the journalist Samer Elzaenen, who regularly appeared on BBC, had suggested that Jews should be burned “like Hitler did it.” Elzaenen, who had appeared 244 times, was consistently featured as a journalist on BBC Arabic.
Fake pictures and lies
Ahmed Qannan, who described an armed man who killed four civilians and an Israeli police officer as a “hero,” appeared more than 200 times on the channel and was presented as a journalist from Gaza.
Ahmed Alagha, who was consistently presented as a journalist, described Israelis as less than human and Jews as “devils.” Alagha appeared 522 times on BBC.
A review of BBC’s coverage of the conflict’s death toll shows that BBC exaggerated the proportion of women and children killed in the conflict. The news of alleged mass graves at Al Nasser Hospital and Al Shifa Hospital claiming that Israeli forces had buried hundreds of bodies was broadcast despite the likely explanation being that the graves at both hospitals were dug by Palestinians and that the people buried there had died or been killed before Israeli ground troops arrived.
The lie from Tom Fletcher, UN Deputy Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, that a UN report had warned that 14,000 infants in Gaza risked starving to death within the next 48 hours received worldwide attention via BBC, even though the UN quickly denied the claim at a press conference.
The same programme also showed pictures of the baby Siwar Ashur, who in reality suffered from allergies, needed specialised formula, and had a congenital condition in the oesophagus that explained the child’s emaciated appearance, but which the BBC used as evidence of the ”famine” in Gaza.
Hamas is made invisible
A BBC News article about a raid on Nasser Hospital accused Israeli troops of excessive force after a hospital raid but did not clarify that international law makes hospitals military targets if they are used as military bases. Nor did the BBC report that Israel had discovered that the terrorist group Hamas was operating out of the hospital.
A letter from 600 lawyers claiming that the British government was breaking international law by selling arms to Israel received extensive coverage on BBC, while another letter claiming the opposite, written by British Lawyers for Israel and signed by more than 1,000 lawyers, was not mentioned at all online or on TV.
BBC Arabic has minimised Israeli suffering in the war in Gaza in order to paint Israel as the aggressor, according to an internal report by an internal investigator.
Accusations against Israel “were spread in the air” without sufficient checks, the report says, suggesting either carelessness or “a desire to always believe the worst about Israel.”
BBC Arabic, which is partly funded by the Foreign Office, gave extensive space to statements from Hamas, making the editorial angle “significantly different” from BBC’s main site, even though it is supposed to reflect the same values.
The BBC also gave “unjustified weight” to Hamas’s claims about the death toll in Gaza, which are widely regarded as exaggerated for propaganda purposes, and falsely claimed that the International Court of Justice had ruled that genocide was taking place.
Former BBC Television director Danny Cohen told The Telegraph: “After making such serious and misleading journalistic mistakes, BBC executives chose to hide them from the public rather than correct the way they communicate… Protecting the BBC’s reputation came before the obligations and principles enshrined in the BBC’s charter.”
He added: “There is now no doubt that the BBC has helped spread Hamas lies around the world and fuelled antisemitism at home.”
Michael Prescott also noted in his report that the BBC had crucially misled viewers by editing together two separate parts of Donald Trump’s speech in January 2021 in order to falsely claim that the outgoing US president had incited protesters to storm Capitol Hill.
