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The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza

Drop Site News is publishing a landmark investigation about the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza by British journalist Owen Jones. His report is based on interviews with 13 journalists and other BBC staffers who offer remarkable insights into how senior figures within the BBC’s news operation skewed stories in favor of Israel’s narratives and repeatedly dismissed objections registered by scores of staffers who, throughout the past 14 months, demanded that the network uphold its commitment to impartiality and fairness. 
 
by Owen Jones
 
Part 7 - Deference to Israeli Claims
 
Since Israel’s onslaught against Gaza began in October 2023, BBC online’s deference to Israeli narratives has been apparent. BBC journalists pointed to specific examples—beginning with the fate of Nasser hospital in Gaza.

In February, the Israeli army laid siege to the hospital. “The evidence at our disposal points to deliberate and repeated attacks by the Israeli forces against Nasser hospital, its patients and its medical staff,” reads a report by NGO Médecins Sans Frontières that detailed the incident. That evidence includes repeated sniper attacks causing multiple deaths and injuries, fatal shell attacks, and the storming of the hospital in February, with the Israeli military detaining an MSF staff member and refusing to offer details on his condition until his release two months later.

The original BBC news headline for an article co-authored by Berg had been updated from “Israel special forces enter besieged Nasser hospital” to “Nasser hospital in catastrophic condition as Israeli troops raid.” The article’s framing aligns with Israeli narratives. The first two paragraphs read:

    Israel’s military claims it has captured “dozens” of terror suspects during a raid on southern Gaza’s main hospital, as staff and patients were forced to flee under gunfire.

    Israel said it launched a “precise and limited mission” at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, adding it had intelligence that Hamas had held hostages there.


No hostages were ever found in Nasser hospital.

Deference to Israel also surfaced in the BBC’s first story on the Israeli army massacre of hungry Palestinians waiting for food in February, an article accompanied with the headline “Israel-Gaza war: More than 100 reported killed in crowd near Gaza aid convoy.” The next day, the headline for a second story was “Large number of bullet wounds among those injured in Gaza aid convoy rush—UN.” The language is puzzling: as the article notes, there were multiple eyewitness accounts of the massacre, along with “the presence of Israeli tanks.” As one BBC journalist said, “‘Israel accused of firing on civilians’ would be more accurate.”

On March 8, the BBC published a subsequent piece by Berg with the headline: “Gaza convoy: IDF says it fired at 'suspects' but not at aid trucks.” The article foregrounds Israeli denials and claims, noting only fleetingly that a UN team had visited the injured and found “a large number of people with bullet wounds” (as per the BBC’s own headline from a few days before). Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that Israeli accounts were contradictory: Mark Regev, now a special advisor to Netanyahu, originally claimed Israeli troops were not involved at all. What makes this even harder to defend on editorial grounds is that BBC Verify—launched in May 2023 as the BBC’s fact checking and anti-disinformation department—published a separate piece on March 1 challenging Israeli claims about the massacre. That work was not woven into Berg’s article.

Two days before the publication of the report, the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor had released detailed evidence of Israeli responsibility, including the apparent use of bullets that matched those in Israeli army weapons. A month later, CNN published a detailed piece based on video and eyewitness accounts discrediting Israeli claims, making it clear that the IDF had fired on crowds without warning, as survivors had said from the start.

In May 2024, far-right Israeli extremists blocked aid from getting into Gaza, in part by attacking and destroying the aid; the BBC headlined its story on the incident: “Israeli activists battle over Gaza-bound aid convoys.” As one BBC journalist said, an accurate headline would have been: “Far-right Israeli activists block aid convoys.” “Aid convoy denied entry to northern Gaza, UN says,” reads another headline from June 2024, neglecting to mention that Israel had been the responsible party.

One staffer believes the BBC has largely sought to align its journalism with the UK government’s foreign policy. As far as top brass is concerned, “Israel is treated like Ukraine, Palestinians like Russia,” the staffer said. If a journalist tries to challenge the double standards applied to Russia and Ukraine, managers are baffled, treating both Ukraine and Israel as British allies. “Look at headlines on what Russia does in Ukraine. But the headlines around Gaza are generally entirely unclear, and are never clear that Israel has been the perpetrator.”

Yet even in cases where the UK government has allowed for dissent, the BBC has largely clung to the Israeli narrative.

In January, the ICJ issued provisional orders to Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide.” But not only do the BBC online articles about famine fail to mention this—they also repeatedly fail to detail the actions being taken by Israel to block aid.

This is despite the fact that Lord David Cameron, the then-foreign secretary, wrote a letter in March to Alicia Kearns, the chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, outlining multiple ways in which the Israeli state was preventing aid from entering Gaza. Even the emphatically pro-Israel Jewish Chronicle ran the damning headline: “David Cameron condemns Israel for arbitrarily blocking Gaza aid.” The BBC website did not report on Cameron’s letter.

Earlier that month, the BBC ran an interview with Cameron on the same subject, with the headline, “David Cameron urges Israel to fix Gaza aid shortages.” Some, though not all, of the points Cameron raised in the letter were covered in the interview, but as one journalist pointed out, examples of Israeli obstructions to aid should be cited in every article on the subject. “Articles on famine in Gaza won’t mention the International Court of Justice rulings, or relevant stuff. The full context is lacking,” another journalist said.

This is consistent with the BBC news website’s coverage under Berg’s editorship. “Palestinian sources need to be verified, but Israeli sources do not,” one journalist said. “There’s red flags if linked to Hamas, but you can quote the IDF freely.”

Full report:


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