When the BBC was forced to admit that a woman it featured as a starving victim of the Gaza war was in fact also receiving treatment for cancer, it was not a minor correction. It was a collapse of credibility. The image of her wasted body, presented as evidence of Israeli starvation tactics, ricocheted across global media. It was powerful and emotive. And it is part of a broader and deeply troubling pattern.
Time and again, when it comes to Israel or Jews, the BBC abandons the basic obligations of journalism: verify before broadcasting, contextualise before condemning, and correct with real transparency when errors occur. The list of failures is not merely anecdotal but institutional.
The problem is particularly acute in BBC Arabic
In November 2021, a BBC report suggested that anti-Muslim slurs were heard from Jewish teenagers on a bus attacked on Oxford Street in London. Ofcom later ruled this a serious editorial misjudgment. In July 2023, a news anchor for the corporation told an Israeli guest that the IDF were ‘happy to kill children’. The BBC apologised, but the smear was broadcast to the country. In October 2023, a live correspondent speculated that the Al-Ahli hospital explosion looked like an Israeli strike. That too was false. The BBC admitted the error only after the damage was done.
In January 2015, during a live broadcast from a major rally after the terrorist attacks in Paris, including the killing of four Jews at the kosher supermarket Hypercacher, the BBC’s Tim Willcox interrupted the daughter of Holocaust survivors who was sharing her experience of enduring anti-Semitism to tell her, ‘Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.’ He admitted it was ‘poorly phrased’, but the BBC did not find he had broken internal editorial rules. In August last year, the BBC interviewed Miriam Margolyes on Radio 4, where she described Dickens’s Fagin as ‘Jewish and vile’, adding, ‘I didn’t know Jews like that then, sadly I do now.’ The BBC removed the clip from iPlayer, but later denied it breached guidelines on racism.
When it comes to the current war in Gaza, there is a pattern in this misreporting. Repeatedly, Hamas claims are aired without verification, Israeli denials are buried, and the most inflammatory interpretations are granted top billing. In November, the BBC falsely reported that the IDF was targeting medics. They later admitted they misquoted a Reuters report. In December, it broadcast Hamas allegations of ‘summary executions’ without corroboration, later apologising for this too. Yet apologies do not erase impact. Nor do they correct the record for those who never see them.
A quiet tweak to a headline and a small note at the bottom is not accountability. It is face-saving. If a newsroom with the BBC’s resources publishes a powerful claim built on a powerful image, the correction should be just as prominent as the original. More importantly, we should learn who signed off on the story, what checks were done, and why those checks failed. This should not be another exercise in a broadcaster marking its own homework. External scrutiny is overdue.
We must not accept that lack of access to Gaza is an excuse for lowering standards – the repeated BBC taunt addressed at Israeli officials. If reporters cannot go in, the burden of verification goes up, not down. There are tools available: open-source investigation, Arabic-language reporting, medical documentation, full-frame image analysis and transparent chains of attribution. Independent researchers have shown what can be done with rigour and patience. Large newsrooms can at least match that.
There is also an editorial problem. Human-interest pieces have their place, but when they become the spine of coverage, the public is left without any grasp of strategy, aims or outcomes. Wars should be covered as wars. Defence and security correspondents ought to lead, explaining objectives, operational realities, advances and setbacks, alongside humane reporting about civilians. Anecdotes should illuminate, not substitute, the analysis.
One clue that this could be attributed to personal animosity of specific people within the organisation is that the problem is particularly acute in BBC Arabic. Its handling of complaints about Israel coverage was the subject of a public apology in 2022, after it was revealed that many valid complaints were ignored, delayed, or quietly corrected without formal acknowledgement.
In May 2025, during a BBC broadcast, a BBC Arabic presenter denied verified details of Hamas’s 7th October atrocities. Around the same time, two contributors picked by the BBC to appear on its high-profile platforms were revealed to have posted violent anti-Semitic messages online. One had written on Facebook: ‘We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left’, as well as: ‘When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything’ and elsewhere on social media ‘#We Are All Hamas You Son of a Jewess’. Another referred to Israelis as ‘not human beings’ and to Jews as ‘devils’. The BBC distanced itself, but why had they invited these monsters to speak in the first place?
This is not confined to fringe voices. In February this year, the BBC aired its now infamous flagship Gaza documentary, narrated by the son of a Hamas official. It was withdrawn shortly afterwards, after a review found it was misleading, and there had been mistranslations and selective editing that softened genocidal language against Jews and extremist tendencies of contributors. The same month, BBC Arabic apologised for a segment implying that Jews spit on Christians as ritual behaviour on Jewish festivals, and for publishing an article that falsely claimed ‘fanatical Jews’ were forerunners of modern suicide bombers, drawing a grotesque historical link to the 9/11 attacks. That article was corrected more than 400 working days after publication.
And now, we are expected to accept that a woman undergoing cancer treatment was accidentally mischaracterised as simply starving, as if no alarm bells rang in the newsroom, no one asked for medical confirmation, no editor queried the provenance of the image. If this is the level of scrutiny applied to material accusing Israel of war crimes, then the BBC is not just failing in its duty, it is participating in a distortion.
That distortion does not begin with 7th October. Nor does it end with Gaza. It reflects something deeper: a willingness to believe the worst about Jews, to frame Israeli actions as uniquely malign, and to amplify outrage over accuracy. Whether this is conscious or not is beside the point. Prejudice does not require intent. But it does demand reckoning.
It is no longer enough for the BBC to apologise after the fact, to tweak headlines quietly, or to promise internal reviews. The time has come for a full, external, public investigation into its coverage of Israel and its treatment of Jewish issues. We must know who approved these stories, what checks failed, and why the same pattern recurs.
When it comes to these slurs and untruths about Jews and Israel, does Britain’s national broadcaster reflect Britain itself? If not, then we must act decisively to prove it. Because a media institution that cannot treat Jews and Israel with basic fairness is not simply failing a minority group, it is failing the country.
Comments