The BBC is turning into a megaphone for Hamas

You could sense teeth were being gnashed hard enough to induce a migraine when the BBC finally announced it would do what it should have done in the first place – investigate how it came to produce and air a documentary on the Gaza war that was narrated by the son of a Hamas minister.

‘There have been continuing questions raised about the programme’, the BBC said this week about Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which aired on BBC Two on Monday. Which is one way of describing the mounting complaints about the film, including a letter headed by former BBC director of television Danny Cohen and an intervention from the UK culture secretary. ‘In the light of these, we are conducting further due diligence with the production company’ that made the film, the BBC said. It has now pulled the documentary from iPlayer pending the outcome of its investigation.

I don’t want to be one of those Jews moaning endlessly about the BBC’s anti-Israel bias, but I do want to know exactly how a child whose father is a Hamas minister, a second child who has been used repeatedly in anti-Israel propaganda, and a third child whose dad was a captain in the Hamas-run police force ended up the key characters in a major documentary on the BBC – the national broadcaster of a country in which Hamas is a proscribed terrorist group.

As an entertainment journalist, I often work closely with the BBC and so am aware of how tightly controlled everything is. It can take days for the numerous approvals necessary just for some anodyne quotes from a celebrity about her latest show. Working on a documentary, particularly with children, requires reams of paperwork that are meant to give a semblance of due diligence. Part of that is meant to involve discussions with a child’s parents about what is going to be filmed. Did the producers not realise, at any point, who any of these children’s parents were? And what about child safeguarding more broadly? Given that Hamas is known to use children for its propaganda purposes, did no one at the BBC think about whether or how these children might have been manipulated?

The scandal was initially unearthed shortly after the documentary aired earlier this week by blogger David Collier. He noticed that the BBC’s child narrator, Abdullah, had previously been used in a Channel 4 programme in November 2023, with a different man falsely claiming to be his father. Collier then discovered that Abdullah was actually the son of the deputy agricultural minister, Ayman Alyazuri, in the Hamas government in Gaza.

Gradually other online sleuths discovered more. The local cameraman the BBC hired had celebrated the 7 October massacre. Even the editing raised serious questions about the footage. A boy called Zakaria appeared with a different haircut, and several different outfits and pairs of shoes, during a segment that the documentary presents as being filmed in a single day.

At first, the BBC claimed it had total editorial control over Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone and that everything was fine – so please could everyone shut up and just concentrate on evil Israel. The following day, the BBC conceded that actually, the independent production company behind the documentary had full editorial control, but everything was still fine. Really fine. It has only been the drip drip of those ‘continuing questions’ that has led to the BBC bothering to investigate what happened.

The BBC has had a shocking war since 7 October. Whenever things flare up between the Israelis and Palestinians, there are competing claims from both sides. Yet the BBC’s catalogue of failings can’t just be put down to the fog of war. It seems its journalists trust what they are told by Hamas more than they trust the Israeli government. Danny Cohen has helmed two lengthy and ever growing reports into the BBC’s errors on the Gaza war, pointing to serious institutional failures and groupthink.

For me, the clearest example of this also emerged this week following Hamas’s handover of four coffins containing dead hostages. Two of these contained the remains of tiny children who were stolen from their home (one was meant to contain the body of their mother, Shiri Bibas, but in Hamas’s sickest stunt yet, it contained a different body). During this grim ceremony, behind the coffins was a grotesque cartoon of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu depicting him as Dracula. To the side were various slogans about ‘Nazi Zionists’, how Hamas wants the war to continue, and some of its own facts and figures about the war’s impact. Yet this is how the BBC’s diplomatic editor Paul Adams described it in his report for the BBC: ‘Once again, there was a stage, flanked by huge posters highlighting the catastrophic consequences of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the Palestinian determination to stay put.’

Why did he miss the Netanyahu cartoon with all its Nazi-esque anti-Semitism? The clue, perhaps, might be found in a post on X he wrote the day after Hamas’s 7 October massacre, which gives the lie to the idea that the BBC’s reporters have any degree of neutrality on this war: ‘7 October was the day Gazans broke out of their dismal prison and exacted terrible revenge. When Israelis, soldiers and civilians alike found themselves on the receiving end of a red mist of pent-up rage.’ Those poor Hamas terrorists. Who could blame them for what they did?

From top to bottom, in both its news and documentary departments, the BBC has a problem. Perhaps a head will roll for this documentary debacle, but the problem is much bigger. The entire organisation needs a root and branch cleansing of this tendency to whitewash a murderous, rapist, Islamist terrorist group. Because I don’t want to pay my licence fee for it any more.

Nicole Lampert is a national newspaper freelance journalist based in London. Follow her on X: @nicolelampert