From uncritically publishing statements from terrorist-run offices to a 5,000 word polemic against Israel, Auntie’s Gaza coverage reveals not bias but a broken editorial culture
June 9, 2025 12:17
Where to start with the BBC? Its obsessive demonisation of Israel feels so overwhelming sometimes that it seems almost impossible to keep a handle on it. But this week Auntie (what a throwback that nickname feels, to a time when Jew-baiting wasn’t top of the BBC’s priorities) has outdone itself.
On Sunday the lead story on its website and app, pushed by one of those news alerts that it supposedly sends out for major breaking stories, was a polemic by the BBC’s International Editor, Jeremy Bowen, with the headline, “Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes – how governments respond could haunt them for years to come.” Do read it.
It’s as if someone had asked ChatGPT to come up with a parody of a Jeremy Bowen report and up had popped 5,000 words of perfect Bowen anti-Israel polemic (yes, it really is 5,000 words). In it, he asks a series of people who share his view of Israel whether they share his view of Israel and, remarkably, they tell him that they do indeed share his view of Israel. To paraphrase: It is a bad country. A very bad country.
And this, according to the BBC, was the single most important thing that has happened anywhere in the world on Sunday, fit to lead every online news outlet the BBC has.
In truth, however, it is entirely appropriate that it led the site and the app because it is of a piece with the BBC’s overall approach to the Gaza war. Just on Saturday morning, a few hours before it decided that the world should pay more attention to Jeremy Bowen’s views, the BBC published a story in which a statement by a Hamas terrorist was taken as, by definition, accurate and honest: "Six Palestinians have been killed and several others wounded by Israeli gunfire in the latest deadly incident close to an aid distribution centre in southern Gaza, the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency says…Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal said at least 15 people had also been killed by Israeli air strikes on a residential home in Gaza city, with reports that some of the casualties remained trapped in the rubble."
The source for that story was “Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal”. Sounds an admirable chap, what with his concern for civil defence and all that. Except it turns out – whoever could have guessed! – that documents released on Sunday by the IDF show that Mahmoud Basal is also an “active terrorist” for Hamas. The IDF says he “has served as a spokesperson for the Civil Defense for a long time and exploits his position to spread false and unverified information to international media outlets, falsely attributing war crimes to Israel and presenting distorted data…This information has received media exposure worldwide and has severely distorted the reality on the ground.”
The documents show that Basal “is a terrorist in the Hamas terror group, and as part of his role, he serves the purposes of psychological warfare and propaganda [and is] listed on a roster of operatives for the group."
These documents emerged after the story was published. But they demonstrate once again the betrayal of basic journalistic standards of the BBC which routinely – as it did here – runs stories with no evidence other than the assertion of the Hamas-run authorities in Gaza.
And now that it is clear just who Mahmoud Basal is, has the BBC altered the story to point out the IDF’s evidence? Have you seen a pig flying outside your window? Of course it hasn’t, at least up to this point in time. This is the BBC, aka known as the Hamas Broadcasting Corporation. For the BBC he remains simply “Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal”.
In this context, there was a particularly shocking interview last week on the BBC itself with its Global News Director, Jonathan Munro, on whether Hamas controls how local Gazan journalists operate. It has been well known and well established for many years that Hamas operates a regime of ruthless censorship. Censorship isn’t actually the right word as the terrorists don’t merely censor news – they attack those who attempt to report anything that does not parrot their propaganda, label them as Israeli spies, and treat them as such, as documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
But not according to Munro, who told his interviewer: "They're not restricted in what they are able to see and show. There may be physical restrictions – for example, not many of them have much fuel to go from one town to another – but there is no restriction on what they can show, what they can see and what they can film when they're on location. There is no suggestion at all that any of those people are under any political influence."
It is jaw-dropping in its ignorance.
In all honesty I can’t make up my mind if Munro is simply utterly out of his depth in his job, or has some sort of agenda. In a way it doesn’t matter, because whatever lies behind his mindset it exposes how nakedly the BBC is prepared to act as a Hamas propaganda machine. But then it’s not as if we needed more evidence of that, is it?
