Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco
Daniel Trilling
13.11.2025Reportage
How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart
Art by Leonard Suryajaya
If there is ever an honest accounting of how Israel was able to commit genocide in Gaza, then the reaction of Western elites to the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 will be regarded as a catastrophic turning point.
It should have been clear that Israel’s response to the atrocities carried out by Palestinian armed groups would constitute an even bigger atrocity. Yet Western leaders behaved as if 7 October was an event out of the blue – as opposed to the latest brutal exchange in a situation where Israel dominates – and continued to provide Israel with the means to kill. Equipped with platitudes about Israel’s right to defend itself, the governments of the UK, the US and the EU turned a blind eye to the vengeful, eliminationist rhetoric emanating from Israeli leaders within hours of the attacks – and then, as the death toll in Gaza soared, the sustained effort to make life there unliveable.
The West’s major media institutions added to the atmosphere of political and cultural censorship that descended after 7 October. They were slow to recognise the destructiveness of Israel’s campaign, and even slower to consider that it amounted to war crimes. They were light on historical context, not least the role of Western powers in aiding Israel’s policies of dispossession and apartheid, and suspicious of Palestinians, who were all too often invited to narrate their own suffering, or apologise for Hamas, but not to offer their own political interpretations of the conflict. “It’s the language of dehumanisation,” I was told by Ahmed Najar, a London-based playwright and political analyst from Gaza who has given dozens of broadcast interviews since 2023.
By the end of 2023, with tens of thousands killed, mainstream media coverage had begun to attract widespread public anger. For two years, millions of people have shared the same jarring experience: we have seen death and destruction live-streamed from Gaza, then seen that same violence sanitised, excused, qualified and debated on air and in print. Some of the West’s major media outlets have been nakedly partisan, even propagandistic, on behalf of Israel. But it’s the more sober purveyors of news – those, in fact, that have cast themselves as defenders of truth against a new wave of disinformation and demagoguery – that have generated the most anger.
For many people all over the world, the BBC became the symbol of this failure. The corporation’s voice – understated, authoritative, reassuring – is a large part of why it is one of the world’s most trusted news sources. But over the past two years, there have been repeated moments when that voice has seemed utterly grotesque. On social media, it became a kind of grim game for people to point out and “correct” the omissions in reporting: headlines that failed to name Israel when it was the perpetrator of violence; copy that rightly used the word “massacre” for the 7 October attacks, but not for incidents of mass killing in Gaza; presenters who rushed to shut down interviewees if they said the word “genocide”. At each of these moments, many of us had the same thought: we can all see what’s happening, so why can’t they say it?
“The BBC and other mainstream media have fallen into the trap of false equivalences between fundamentally unequal situations,” I was told recently by Liliane Landor, who, as director of the World Service, was one of the BBC’s most senior editors until she left last year. “Fear of controversy has prevented these organisations from pursuing and reporting uncomfortable truths.”
In a statement to Equator, the BBC said it was “fully committed to covering the conflict impartially”. This defence is precisely the problem. Over the past two years, the BBC has been fiercely criticised by both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli camps. But it is criticism from supporters of Israel, whose cause has been co-opted into a culture war being waged on the BBC, that has prompted the most trouble. The BBC’s leaders have repeatedly tried and failed to appease their critics on the right. Last week, this culminated in the defenestration of the corporation’s most senior executive, director general Tim Davie, and its most senior journalist, Deborah Turness, head of BBC News.
I spent months talking to more than two dozen current and former BBC journalists, from frontline reporters and producers to senior editors, who think the corporation mishandled its response to the Gaza war. Many of them described a “culture of fear” inside the BBC. No other issue, said several people who have worked directly on the subject, seems to provoke more nervousness or more meddling from the corporation’s multiple layers of management. “With other Western clients, there has been a lot of top-down interference,” said one freelancer who has won awards for their journalism, “but not as much as from the BBC.” Most people I spoke to asked to remain anonymous, to protect their jobs.
In the early stages of the war, timid, hesitant coverage of Israel’s violence (in stark contrast to that of the Hamas-led attacks), prompted an internal staff revolt. Yet this year, even as the BBC’s journalism was belatedly becoming more forthright, pressure from the opposite direction – from those who claim, implausibly, that the corporation displays systemic bias against Israel, by “painting it as the aggressor” – caused an institutional meltdown.
In February, the BBC pulled a major documentary about conditions for civilians in Gaza from its streaming platform, after pro-Israel critics seized on an error of omission. The fallout led to the cancellation of a second documentary about conditions in Gaza, which later aired on a rival channel to broad acclaim. But these moves failed to stop the criticism. In November, questionable allegations of anti-Israel bias formed a large part of the leaked “dossier”, compiled by a former BBC adviser, that brought down Davie and Turness.
The BBC has got into more contortions over Gaza, more publicly and spectacularly, than any of its peers. But this is not just a story about one institution. The BBC exhibits symptoms of the West’s wider moral breakdown over Gaza – the failure even to name genocide, let alone stop it, when a Western ally is the perpetrator. Because of the BBC’s peculiar position in the hierarchy of global power, it is a particularly revealing example.
The BBC is really two things at once: a valuable public resource with a remit to provide independent journalism, plus arts, entertainment and education for the UK – and an arm’s-length instrument of the British state. Broadcasting to the world in more than 40 languages, but above all, in English, it is a remnant of a vanished empire, which became a trusted voice of what arose next: the US-dominated liberal international order. For years, it has been the clock by which other media organisations set their watches. “When we’re in doubt about what language to use [on Israel-Palestine], we look at what the BBC is doing,” said a producer for a rival UK news broadcaster.
Yet as our global order decays, jettisoning its professed universal values for something more nakedly violent, nationalist and anti-democratic, the BBC has the unenviable task of narrating the collapse, while also being subject to it. And just as Gaza has proved to be a place where the failings of Western political institutions are exposed, the BBC has itself come unstuck.
The BBC is a large, complex organisation with 5,500 journalists at its disposal, grouped into hundreds of national, regional and international teams that are often competing against one another. (“It’s like Game of Thrones,” a senior producer said of the BBC’s internal culture.) There are few explicit top-down editorial directives about what journalists should or should not report. And as you might expect from an organisation with an annual budget of £5.7bn, its first response to the 7 October attacks was in some ways exemplary.
Reporters and producers were swiftly dispatched to Israel-Palestine, to complement the already well-staffed Jerusalem bureau. The BBC covered the human impact and aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks vividly. As Israel began bombing, the corporation’s Arabic service launched a daily emergency news broadcast into Gaza. By the end of October, BBC radio had aired two documentaries on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, one on a national UK station and the other on the World Service.
But problems in the BBC’s coverage were visible early on. One, according to several BBC journalists I spoke to, was a failure to anticipate the scale and intensity of the Israeli bombardment, and its implications for every person living in Gaza. An experienced journalist who was on the ground in Israel-Palestine in October 2023 said that the BBC, like many other media organisations, treated the horror of the attacks like “a 9/11 event” – appearing from out of nowhere – and did not properly scrutinise Israel’s developing response.
“It was clear exactly what the tone was from Israel: it was going to be vengeance,” said another journalist who spent much of October speaking to Israeli politicians, military officials and members of the public for several national UK news programmes. “I remember feeding this back and saying, there is a level of dehumanisation happening here, of people who within a couple of days were getting bombed.” Yet some editors and managers at the BBC’s London headquarters were unresponsive, the journalist recalled. “In some of the meetings they were saying: ‘But what else is Israel supposed to do?’”
Even after the destruction of Gaza was well under way, other journalists told me, there was an ongoing nervousness around stories – particularly long-form productions – that could be perceived as critical of Israel. “I’ve never seen so much heavy-handedness,” said one experienced producer. “On-the-ground reporting was fine, but coming back [to London] and working on the edit was really different… so many people wanted to be involved.” In particular, said the producer, “there was an intense desire not to offend the Israelis” among some editors and middle managers – an insistence on including copious Israeli official denials, and a suspicion of Palestinian contributors.
This impression was shared by a colleague who worked on a separate long-form project. “I walked into the edit one day and one of the assistant producers had pages and pages of social media printouts, to make sure there were no expressions of support for Hamas [by our Palestinian interviewees],” said the journalist, adding that no corresponding checks – for instance, for far-right views – were applied to Israeli interviewees. Mohamed Shalaby, a film-maker and reporter who collected voice notes and video diaries from civilians in Gaza, told me he experienced similar pressure. “In any story we do as journalists, we would check that a source is credible and independent in relation to the information you’re getting from them,” Shalaby said. “But that’s different from a background check. You need a high editorial threshold to do that. But this process has been used against Palestinians in a way that is unprecedented.”
After seven years of contract work, Shalaby left in August after challenging a BBC report that stated Anas Al-Sharif, an Al Jazeera journalist who was assassinated by Israel, had once worked for a Hamas media team – a claim that Shalaby said had not been independently verified. The IDF repeatedly accused Al-Sharif of being a Hamas operative shortly before it killed him, accusations the Committee to Protect Journalists described as smears. “Day after day, I saw the world’s most influential newsroom bend under political pressure,” Shalaby wrote after departing.
Many of my interviewees described an overly cautious approach to news items about the war – especially in headlines on the BBC News website, which receives around a billion visits a month. Stories that appear on the front page of the website are signed off by a “curation team” of senior editors who make decisions about presentation. But one experienced online editor told me that particularly sensitive stories – including those about Israel-Palestine – are subject to additional checks. “They committee a headline to death,” said the online editor.
The result was a rash of headlines, typically involving Israeli violence, that were passive to the point of absurdity. Perhaps the most infamous was the story of Muhammed Bhar, a man with learning difficulties who was locked in a room and left to die by Israeli soldiers after he was mauled by their dog during a raid. When it first went out, it was titled simply “The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome”. (It was later updated.)
Karishma Patel, a former BBC radio newsreader, told me that presenters seemed particularly exercised when interviewees used the word “genocide”. It is an emotive term, certainly, but in this case was a necessary one to debate, especially as a growing number of scholars and experts deployed it. “You could see them panicking, baulking at the word,” said Patel. “But they are paid large amounts of money not to panic on air.”
These editorial tics attracted public criticism, particularly as rival UK outlets such as Sky and ITV began to report on Israel’s military conduct with a more forthright tone. A more profound problem, according to some journalists I spoke to, were occasions when the likely legal implications of Israel’s conduct – and, by extension, the consequences for allies like Britain, who were providing support – were not fully explored.
In January 2024, for instance, the BBC’s UK rolling news channel cut away from South Africa’s submission to the International Court of Justice on why it believed Israel was committing genocide – yet the following day, devoted hours of live coverage to Israel’s rebuttal. (David Jordan, the BBC’s head of editorial policy, later told British MPs this was viewed internally as “a mistake”, but stressed that international audiences had been able to see more of South Africa’s arguments.) A report published in June 2025 by the Centre for Media Monitoring – an independent body originally established by the Muslim Council of Britain – found more than 100 occasions on which presenters had apparently shut down the mention of genocide.
In its defence, the BBC argues that such studies are partial, and not an accurate reflection of its output. Some journalists I spoke to agreed with this. “On the TV and radio bulletins you hear [BBC] journalists working very hard to get stories out – teams including Israeli and Palestinian journalists – yet what will go viral is a stupid remark in the heat of the moment by a presenter on the News channel,” said a journalist who has reported on screen since October 2023. “If you have a strong story and can back it up, it can go out.” All the same, said the journalist, at points they also felt the BBC’s coverage was lagging behind: “Look at Al Jazeera… they’ve covered the conflict in granular detail.”
A senior editor pointed out that high-profile correspondents, like BBC veterans Jeremy Bowen and Fergal Keane, had more freedom to speak plainly. “Certain people can’t be touched in the BBC, which is why their reporting is much better,” said the senior editor. In its statement to Equator, the BBC said it had covered the war’s impact on both Palestinian and Israeli citizens, and that it consistently explores historical context, as well as accusations of genocide. The press office provided several examples of recent coverage, including a pair of articles by Bowen considering the possibility that Israel had committed war crimes.
In the early months of the war, disputes about BBC coverage began to reverberate among the corporation’s 21,000 employees: amid spikes in antisemitism and Islamophobia in the UK, Jewish and Muslim staff networks were established. Staff from a wider range of backgrounds also began to organise. In November 2023, Patel and seven other journalists sent an open letter to Al Jazeera – the first of several such letters over the course of a year – describing a “double standard in how civilians are seen” by the BBC. They argued that while the BBC was “unflinching” in its reporting of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, it did not apply the same rigour when it came to Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Between November 2023 and July 2024, the BBC’s senior management held a series of “listening sessions” – meetings with representatives of various staff groups to discuss their concerns. “They were polite, but nothing happened afterwards,” Patel told me. A senior BBC journalist who was also present at these meetings said management eventually conceded that reports on Gaza should contain a standard caveat that Israel would not allow international journalists access to the territory. But even securing that concession “was like pulling teeth”. (The BBC told Equator that it has repeatedly called on the Israeli government to allow international journalists into Gaza.)
The overall response from management, said the senior journalist, “was belittling – they’d pat us on the head [and] say: ‘We’re concerned your group is overwhelmingly Muslim heritage and the other group is mostly Jewish, so we’ve offered you both counselling.’” Two other journalists I spoke to described this attitude as “colonial” – that it felt like management was trying to mediate between ethnic groups rather than take criticism seriously. Others were dismayed by an apparent ignorance among senior managers about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. At a fractious meeting of more than 100 staff in late 2023, Turness – then the CEO of BBC News – told colleagues: “We’ve got to all remember that this all started on 7 October.”
Still image drawn from Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, 2025
When challenged on Israel-Palestine, the BBC’s senior managers have reached for their time-honoured defence that the BBC has a duty to be impartial. Samir Shah, the current chair of the BBC Board, the corporation’s governance body, said in December 2023 that the ambition for BBC journalists “should be that neither side is criticising us and [everyone] thinks we’re doing well”.
Many of the journalists I spoke to, however, felt this was weak. “They’re terrified of the pro-Israel lobby and of [UK] government criticism,” said a senior reporter and presenter, adding that in private conversations some senior managers will admit this. “But when you’re around the table [in a meeting with them] it’s different.”
Others felt the culture of fear was bigger than Gaza. “The BBC doesn’t have an Israel problem, it has an authority problem,” said an experienced television news editor.
Since the BBC’s inception in 1922, when the British government of the day decided it needed a state-backed broadcaster to regulate the emerging technology of radio, it has been riven by a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, the BBC is a public-service broadcaster whose independence from government is guaranteed by royal charter. On the other hand, the majority of its funding comes from a licence fee whose terms are set by government once a decade. Ministers also appoint board members, who in turn make hiring decisions about other senior managers – in particular the director general, the corporation’s chief executive.
On a day-to-day basis, the BBC is free from direct political interference. But it displays what is best termed an “establishment bias”. Mike Berry, a sociologist of media at Cardiff University, told me that his research shows how the BBC tends to calibrate its politics according to the centre of gravity in Westminster. Take climate change, for example: for years, the British right and its fossil-fuel backers largely pursued a strategy of denial. It was not until 2018 that BBC bosses issued guidance to report on climate change as if it were definitely taking place, telling journalists: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate”.
For Berry, who has carried out multiple in-depth studies on media coverage of Israel-Palestine since the early 2000s, the BBC shows “consistent gaps” in its reporting on the conflict, which echo Britain’s generally pro-Israel stance. In fact, some of these gaps were neatly summarised in 2006 by an independent report commissioned by the BBC itself: “reactive journalism” with “an absence of historical background”; “little reporting of the difficulties faced by the Palestinians in their daily lives”; and “the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation”.
According to Berry, who is now studying BBC coverage of the war and shared some of his preliminary results with Equator, these disparities persist. For instance, Berry examined more than 7,000 lines of text transcribed from News at Ten – the BBC’s flagship television news programme – in the two months after 7 October 2023. Of these 7,000, fewer than 50 discussed any aspect of the conflict’s history prior to the Hamas attacks.
Berry could not find a single line mentioning the fact that Palestinians can not move freely across the occupied territories or that they are subject to what leading human rights groups describe as a system of apartheid. There were only three lines on Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza. “Crucially,” Berry told me, “these scattered fragments were not gathered together to explain Palestinian action in the way that Israeli rationales routinely were.”
The BBC journalists Berry has interviewed for his studies over the years tend to cite a range of factors that they believe shape Israel-Palestine coverage: effective PR by the Israeli embassy and the work of pressure groups, certainly; but perhaps more importantly, the British state’s institutional relationship to both Israel and the US. “Everyone is aware that Israel is an ally,” Berry said, adding that “an outsized presence of the US in BBC coverage” also comes to bear, since the US is Israel’s main patron. (Like the rest of the UK media and political scene, the BBC pays intense attention to American affairs.)
In recent years there has been a more specific form of political pressure. Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian who has reported extensively on the BBC’s relationship with Westminster, told me he believes the corporation is afflicted by a culture of “caution and cravenness” that began with the 2003 Iraq war. In 2004, the BBC’s then director general Greg Dyke was forced out after what he described as “intense pressure”, “bullying” and “intimidation” from the government of Tony Blair over the corporation’s reporting on the Iraq War. That “traumatic” event, said Rusbridger, led to a “generation of arse-covering”, with senior managers terrified of political controversy.
According to Rusbridger, this bequeathed a management culture prone to anticipatory caution and over-correction. Emblematic of this behaviour was the BBC’s response to revelations about Jimmy Savile, a stalwart of the corporation’s entertainment output for decades – and one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders, who hid his abuse in plain sight, partly by cultivating friendships with politicians and the royal family. After Savile died in 2011, the BBC dropped an investigation into his deeds, then fell apart when its apparent act of censorship was exposed by its own journalists.
In the past decade, as British politics has moved sharply rightwards, pressure has intensified. Since the 2016 Brexit referendum, the BBC has been castigated by politicians and the press as the symbol of an out-of-touch liberal elite. (For even longer, one veteran senior journalist told me, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and the Murdoch papers have been “like noisy ghosts in the minds of BBC editors”.) Governments often try to install allies at the top of the BBC, but appointments made by the right-wing populist government of Boris Johnson, elected in 2019, were especially brazen. Richard Sharp, a Conservative Party donor appointed as BBC chair in 2021, was later forced to resign after it emerged he had helped Johnson secure an £800,000 personal loan. Robbie Gibb, a former journalist and BBC board member who sits on the corporation’s editorial standards committee, worked for the Conservative prime minister Theresa May. Until recently he was the frontman for an opaquely funded consortium that owned The Jewish Chronicle, a UK newspaper that aligned itself with the Israeli right, and which has called for Parliament to investigate the BBC’s coverage of Israel.
Even before this autumn’s crisis, Rusbridger described the BBC as a weakened organisation. He pointed out that Tim Davie, whose background is in marketing and PR, had relatively little journalistic experience for a BBC director general. One senior producer said that Turness, who previously held senior positions at ITN, NBC News and ITV News, “would have made an excellent fairweather leader, but she’s totally unsuited for this moment”. A former close colleague of Turness agreed. “Deborah is deeply humane,” said the former colleague. “She could see right from the start that this [Israel’s response to 7 October 2023] was going to turn into a bloody massacre. But she was under enormous pressure.”
One of the principal ways the right applies pressure to the BBC is to take ordinary errors – the clumsily edited clip of Trump that helped bring down Davie and Turness this month is a case in point – and use these to allege systematic left-wing bias. These often relate to domestic UK matters, but more recently there has been a steady drumbeat of accusations, notably from The Telegraph, that the BBC is biased against Israel. (One of the newspaper’s columnists, the former BBC television executive Danny Cohen, has addressed this subject in at least 28 articles since October 2023.)
There is widespread cultural and political sympathy for Israel within the British establishment. But for a section of Britain’s political class – especially the ascendant populist right – support for Israel is not merely a matter of expedience; it is a gauge by which allegiance to Britishness itself is measured, because it sees Israel as the West’s outpost in a savage neighbourhood, and expressions of solidarity with Palestinians as evidence of an enemy within.
One way this outside pressure shows itself is in a pre-emptive caution around Israel-Palestine, according to BBC staff I spoke to, who described middle-ranking editors and junior journalists scrambling to anticipate the reactions of senior management. “It’s like Communist Russia – everyone’s trying to keep Stalin happy,” said a producer.
There is no better symbol of this fear than the insistence in BBC copy, since October 2023, that casualty figures in Gaza come from the “Hamas-run health ministry”.
This, frankly, is a propaganda term. It masquerades as precision – after all, who could oppose more detail about the source of a statistic? But the formulation spread among many Western media organisations after Israel and its allies, notably the then US president Joe Biden, cast doubt on the veracity of the death toll in Gaza. (Independent bodies, including the UN, consider the overall figures to be reliable.) In December 2024, the ombudsman for the BBC’s Canadian equivalent, CBC, advised journalists to avoid the qualifier because, while factually accurate, it risks “contributing to a belief that every single Gazan is somehow linked to an organisation that carried out the October 7th attacks”.
There has never been a formal decree insisting the term be used, according to the journalists I spoke to. But they had the clear impression that, in the words of one, it was “non-negotiable”.
The tone of BBC coverage on key issues is set in two places. One is at the daily morning news conference, when senior editors across the BBC’s news output meet with the CEO’s team to discuss the day’s stories. The other is at regular meetings of the News Board, where the CEO and other senior journalists discuss longer-term issues of editorial policy. A senior journalist familiar with the situation told me the consensus was that the phrase “was good cover for us”. There was no edict emailed to staff, said the senior journalist, but “it was made absolutely clear at editorial meetings that ‘Hamas-run health ministry’ was the sentence to use”.
Several journalists in BBC newsrooms around the UK had similar experiences. “It would appear in my news scripts even if I hadn’t put it there myself,” said Karishma Patel, who worked in the Manchester offices of 5 Live, a national talk radio service. An experienced producer said that economic pressures made it harder for rank-and-file journalists to speak up and challenge editorial decisions they disagreed with. “The culture of fear permeates everything. People are scared of losing their jobs.”
In February 2025, the BBC plunged into an institutional crisis from which it still has not emerged. The trigger was a post by the pro-Israel blogger David Collier, who revealed that the child narrator of the BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which followed four young people living amid bombardment, was the son of a deputy agriculture minister in Gaza’s Hamas-run government. The film-makers had not disclosed this fact to viewers.
A chorus of voices, including the pressure group CAMERA (“Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting”), the Israeli embassy in London and the Board of Deputies of British Jews – the UK’s largest Jewish representative body, which sees defending Israel’s reputation as part of its remit – condemned the BBC. The Telegraph joined the chorus, despite having initially given the film a positive review. Another pressure group, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, organised protests outside the BBC’s London headquarters and called for its funding to be suspended while the matter was investigated. “Why has nobody been fired?” the British culture minister, Lisa Nandy, later asked.
Supporters of many causes lobby the BBC, in public and in private, especially during wars. This year, the British Palestinian Committee, a network of Palestinian citizens of the UK, met with Tim Davie, who has also met representatives of the Board of Deputies since October 2023. What sets pro-Israel advocacy apart from other causes is its scale and intensity – and its ability to prompt institutions into panic when something goes wrong. “Please think really hard before you publish anything,” reads guidance on Israel-Palestine, seen by Equator, emailed to journalists working on the BBC News website in 2019. In the first months of the war, Davie reportedly told colleagues that pro-Israel groups were more organised than their pro-Palestinian counterparts.
Many of the journalists I spoke to felt that complaints about perceived anti-Israel bias prompted more nervousness among staff than any other comparable issue.“The Israeli embassy are just bastards to [BBC] staff, bullying them,” said an experienced television news producer, adding that in their experience over many years, if a story critical of Israel went out on the BBC’s rolling news channel, the embassy would be on the phone within minutes to complain. (The Israeli embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment.) Journalists are also aware that a range of pressure groups will be scouring their social media output, past work and personal connections to jump on any hint of bias.
The nervousness can also lead well-meaning editors to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, or to assume that all Jewish people think the same way about Israel. One Jewish journalist recalled, incredulously, being warned by a non-Jewish colleague, “We have to think about how Jewish people will see this.”
Poorly informed discussion of pro-Israel lobbying can be fuel for antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish influence. The BBC does not concede to every demand: for instance, it has declined to describe Hamas as “terrorists”, despite repeated requests – including from leading politicians like Keir Starmer, now the UK prime minister. (The BBC’s editorial guidelines, sensibly, advise journalists to treat “terrorist” as a loaded term.) Pro-Israel advocacy is effective partly because it pushes at an open door: the UK, a former colonial power in Palestine, pursues an alliance with Israel for its own strategic interests.
Many complaints by pro-Israel advocates are bad faith, or treat scrutiny of Israel as antisemitic. But complaints are most effective when they have a point. Jewish staff within the BBC have been rightly upset by antisemitic or inflammatory comments made by colleagues about the war. The worst such example was a scheduling coordinator at BBC Three who was sacked in February 2024 for a series of Facebook posts in which she described Jews as an “invader coloniser species” and referred to the “holohoax”. That August, more than 200 mostly Jewish figures from the television and film industry called on the BBC to investigate what they called “systemic problems of antisemitism and bias”. The BBC’s Arabic service has also attracted complaints: it has been repeatedly criticised – including in the memo that led to Davie and Turness resigning – for working with journalists who have made antisemitic statements, or who made posts on social media that appeared to endorse the 7 October attacks.
Where pro-Israel critics part ways with reality is in what they extrapolate from such failings. For Stephen Pollard, a former editor of The Jewish Chronicle, the Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone row was evidence that the BBC is institutionally antisemitic, the product of a mindset that “Israel is by definition evil and Gazans virtuous”.
On 21 February, four days after it was first broadcast, the film was removed from the BBC’s streaming service, iPlayer. All the journalists I spoke to acknowledged that failing to disclose its narrator’s connection to a government official was a serious and avoidable error: an internal review and a report by the UK broadcast regulator concurred. But many felt it was excessive to remove the film entirely, and that the BBC should have added a clarification and defended the essential merits of the journalism. (The internal review also found the film was “an important record of the impact of the Israel-Gaza war” and that nothing in the narrator’s scripted presentation itself contravened impartiality.)
According to an investigative reporter who works at the BBC’s London headquarters, the incident triggered “a huge drop in confidence across the building”. Since then, the overbearing editorial processes that their colleagues experienced in the first year of the conflict appear to have grown even more intense.
In addition to the usual consultations with the BBC’s legal and editorial policy departments, documentaries and investigations became subject to an additional sign-off process called “final gate”. This entails a meeting in which journalists and senior editors are asked to raise any potential risks or concerns, which some of my interviewees felt was more about spreading the blame if something went wrong. “Final Gate is about everyone getting involved and having their hands dipped in blood,” said one producer.
An international reporter felt this added to existing pressure that puts people off pitching ideas on Israel-Palestine in the first place. “You have to be prepared to have your career destroyed at the BBC just for publishing a story,” said the reporter. “That’s not a healthy way to do journalism.” Three producers expressed concern that the BBC’s handling of the affair would damage trust with potential collaborators in the Middle East; one said they would think twice about working for the BBC again.
In early June, staff discontent boiled over at an online Q&A with Davie and Turness. Equator has seen a selection of the questions submitted by staff, including those about a second documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which at the time was being withheld from broadcast pending further editorial checks:
“Why are you not allowing the release of Gaza: Medics Under Fire [sic]? Are you aware this has negatively impacted the BBC’s reputation and ability to tell Palestine stories?”
“I find myself unable to defend a great deal of the reporting I see, and that is an uncomfortable and depressing position to be in while watching a genocide unfold.”
“Given the plans to introduce extra diligence and ‘signposting’ for contributors from Gaza, regarding any connections however distant with Hamas, do we plan to do the same with the other side of the war? Many contributors we use from Israel also has [sic] a link to the IDF.”
“I’m often confronted about the BBC being a propaganda machine and biased about Gaza… I love my job but sometimes I can’t tell anyone I work here for fear of arguments. What can be done about this?”
“Will the BBC rethink its policy of using ‘Hamas-run’ to describe the health ministry, given the scale of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza & the growing international criticism of Israel? 20 months into war does the audience still need to be reminded it’s Hamas-run[?]”
“Why did you [Tim Davie] have a public meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky? I’m asking because I think we treat our approach to impartiality on this story and on Gaza differently.”
“We’re getting a lot of questions about Gaza,” said the Q&A host, somewhat nervously. Davie and Turness tried to strike a reassuring tone. “Obviously, the doctors told their stories and everybody wants their voices to be heard,” Turness said, “but we must also do the right thing for the BBC, for impartiality and to be careful and properly thoughtful about our journalism.”
Davie insisted the BBC was not “leaning to one lobby or another”. It was an “incredibly pressured” time, he added, noting that the BBC’s headquarters had recently been defaced by pro-Palestine protesters. “If you’re in the Jewish community, if you’re in the Muslim community, you know, you can often feel this very personally,” he said. “We care about this, but that does mean sometimes you’ve got tough journalistic calls where we’re totally being driven by our need to be impartial and protect the reputation of the BBC so we can do this journalism.”
He added: “Look after yourself… we’re there for people as a caring employer.”
Still image drawn from Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, 2025
In the BBC’s contorted response to Gaza, it is possible to discern a section of Britain’s managerial elite struggling to avoid falling into a chasm that has opened beneath them. From their point of view, the political passions unleashed by the war must look like mere “polarisation”: a shouting match between rival interest groups who need to be soothed. Deborah Turness said as much in a blog post published one year into “the most polarising conflict that any of us have experienced in our careers as journalists”. Criticism of the BBC’s impartial reporting, she wrote, could largely be “explained by social media algorithms and echo chambers that serve consumers more of what they already ‘like’.”
That is an insufficient explanation – but it also points to the failure of impartiality as a guiding principle for journalism that claims to seek truth and not just reflect power.
“Impartiality is an embattled concept,” the former World Service director Liliane Landor told me. “In the coverage of Gaza, it has morphed into a kind of performative neutrality – one that prioritises the optics of ‘balance’ over rigorous factual clarity and truth-telling.” What the BBC and other media organisations need instead, she said, is journalism “grounded in evidence and brave enough in following facts wherever they lead – rather than hiding behind ‘balance’ when the facts are asymmetrical”.
This year, the status quo approach foundered. Over the summer, management tried to draw a line under the crisis triggered by Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, by minimising the risk of further complaints from pro-Israel advocates. At the end of June, it cancelled Gaza: Doctors Under Attack shortly after the documentary’s freelance presenter said Israel had “become a rogue state that’s committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing” in a BBC radio interview.
The cancellation was justified on the grounds that the BBC couldn’t risk the “perception of partiality” – a line that met with a scathing response from several of my interviewees. “That’s what you get when you have a PR man in charge,” one said. If people’s subjective impressions of bias are what matters, several pointed out, then how could the BBC continue to justify Robbie Gibb’s role on the corporation’s board, given his political associations?
In July, the BBC announced more new editorial policies intended to prevent a repeat of the Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone fiasco. Some of the measures seem sensible: for instance, a dedicated senior BBC producer is now meant to join out-of-house documentary teams, to ensure proper oversight. Others less so. In an email sent to all BBC News staff, Turness explained that the “Final Gate” editorial approval process introduced earlier in the year would be made permanent – and supplemented with additional controls called “First Gate”, so that “no high-risk long form programmes can become a formal commission until all potential compliance considerations are considered and listed, including rigorous social media and background checks”. An experienced producer I spoke to felt this would unfairly exclude a range of potential collaborators. “This effectively silences anyone who works for or with the BBC,” said the producer. “They can wreck careers on the basis of a tweet someone posted when they were 14 and they won’t even know it.”
Yet if such measures were intended to stave off claims of anti-Israeli bias, they didn’t work. In early November, The Telegraph began publishing excerpts from a dossier of complaints compiled by Michael Prescott, a former political editor of the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times who recently served as an adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee. A large part of the dossier concerned Gaza coverage. It accused BBC Arabic of publishing a disproportionate number of stories about Palestinian suffering, which Prescott concluded were “designed to minimise Israeli suffering and paint Israel as the aggressor”, and the BBC more widely of rushing to report claims about Israel without adequate checks. “The errors come thick and fast, sometimes with ‘eyewitness’ testimony from locals who have Tweeted in praise of the October 7 killings and worse,” wrote Prescott.
When Davie and Turness resigned on 9 November, the Israeli government was quick to declare that the BBC had admitted failures in its Gaza coverage. Davie’s resignation, said the country’s foreign ministry, “underscores the deep-seated bias that has long characterised the BBC’s coverage of Israel”. It went on: “For far too long, the BBC has spread disinformation that fuels antisemitism and radicalisation. But the problem extends beyond the BBC – far too many news outlets are promoting politics disguised as facts, amplifying Hamas’s fake campaigns.”
Of course, what really did for Davie and Turness was Donald Trump. But in a way, it’s not the specific issue that matters. The most telling thing about Prescott’s dossier was the overall range of claims it made, each one a familiar right-wing talking point: bias against Trump and Israel; overly positive treatment of trans people and overly negative treatment of British colonial history; a reluctance to frame immigration as a problem.
These seemingly unconnected topics are, of course, the daisy chain of issues that the populist right is using to cast itself as a defender of ordinary people against an out-of-touch, “woke” liberal elite. The lesson, according to several journalists I spoke to this week, was that the failure of management to defend its journalism on Israel-Palestine has only helped make way for a wider assault. (Prescott, as has been widely reported this week, is a friend and ally of Robbie Gibb.) “Seriously, what is this conflation?” one journalist said of the dossier. The journalist, like others I spoke to, saw the resignations as a foolish admission that the BBC was indeed biased, in all the ways the right claims. “Leaving like that,” they said of Turness and Davie, “was like, you’ve had the wolves at your door and now you’ve handed them the keys.”
The irony is that all this has unfolded over a period in which Western political elites began to concede that Israel may have done something appalling in Gaza – and in which the BBC’s own journalism had started to become more assertive. Several sources told me this had begun with more robust reporting on starvation in Gaza caused by Israel’s aid blockade earlier this year. “Senior staff didn’t want a situation where we avoid saying it but viewers can see the pictures of what’s happening,” one journalist who has reported from the region told me.
In September the BBC and other news agencies launched a film calling on the Israeli authorities to allow international journalists into Gaza, and acknowledging the work of Palestinian journalists – more than 200 of whom have been killed so far. (“We’ve finally decided to take a position on Gaza,” a senior journalist said to me.)
Now, many of my sources are gloomy about the future. “That the two most senior figures at the BBC should step down over a year-old Panorama edit,” Landor told me, “while the organisation’s pliant, at times deliberately cautious and hesitant coverage of Gaza has drawn little internal scrutiny, is difficult to comprehend.” (Landor acknowledged that the error in the Trump documentary – in which a speech was edited to make it seem as if he explicitly encouraged his supporters to attack the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 – was serious and should have been rectified, though she questioned whether it was deliberately misleading.)
“It just goes to show, they’re always so, so scared of the right,” said another journalist of the BBC’s leadership. “Anything coming from the left they find so easy to disregard, but once The Telegraph starts laying into them for a couple of days they’re like, oh yeah, we’ll jump off.”
The West’s failure to meaningfully oppose genocide in Gaza is a disaster first and foremost for Palestinians. But there is also a boomerang effect at work here. Western political institutions have been shamed in the eyes of many of their own voters, deepening an already widespread cynicism about politics that is being amply exploited for reactionary ends. Inevitably, the West’s flagship media outlets have become entangled in the collapse.“A lot of the [pro-Palestinian] criticism directed at the BBC is people looking for a scapegoat to blame for their own powerlessness to stop the war,” the journalist who has reported on screen since the beginning of the conflict told me. “And we are seen as the agent of power.”
Yet this is precisely the moment we need journalists to stand up to power – and to figures, such as the American president threatening to sue the BBC into silence – who would wield it to abuse us.
It would be too easy to say that the BBC could have avoided this crisis if it had simply listened to those who tried to raise the alarm about Gaza – the journalists who insisted that it was, at root, a matter of telling the truth and defending the right to do so. But, as one journalist told me, at least it might have been better equipped for the fight.
“We saw it coming,” the journalist said. “If you keep giving the bully what it wants, the bully is not going to stop.”