OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
5:55 PM – Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Following its broadcast of a documentary about the Gaza Strip on Monday, which happened to be narrated by the son of a Hamas official, the BBC has come under fire after being labeled a Hamas propaganda outlet.
Advertisement
On February 17th, the one-hour documentary “Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone” was aired.
Three children’s perspectives on the ongoing Middle East conflict were depicted in the program.
Abdullah, 14, who is identified as “Abdullah al-Yazouri” in the documentary’s credits, takes on the role of narrator in the aired broadcast. Ayman Alyazouri, the deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas-controlled administration, is Abdullah’s father. The boy’s father is a Hamas government minister.
According to The Telegraph, viewers were not made aware of the child’s family connections.
Soon after, in a formal complaint, Labour Against Antisemitism accused the BBC of failing to verify the participants’ backgrounds for the documentary.
“This documentary appears to have been a failure of due diligence by the BBC, with Hamas propaganda promoted as reliable fact at the taxpayers’ expense,” stated Alex Hearn, director of Labour Against Antisemitism.
“Misinformation is the story of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and this is not an isolated case. There has been a failure of news platforms to adequately scrutinize sources and a willingness to regurgitate Hamas disinformation repeatedly,” Hearn continued. “There needs to be an urgent investigation into how this happened once again.”
David Collier, an investigative journalist and the first to reveal the controversies of the documentary, questioned how the filmmakers—especially the two local cameramen—could have been unaware of Abdullah’s family connections.
“The two photographers followed these children around for months. They absolutely knew who he was. Did either of the producers?” Collier questioned. “How did the BBC let a son of a Hamas minister walk around looking for sympathy and demonizing Israel for an hour in a BBC documentary?”
However, a BBC spokesman soon came to the defense of the filming, saying it: “was produced in line with BBC editorial guidelines and the BBC had full editorial control,” adding “the children’s parents did not have any editorial input.”
“It is about time that the BBC understood that the only organization that has editorial control over what we see come out of Gaza is Hamas. This latest failing is perhaps the worst yet. There needs to be an urgent investigation into how the BBC is continually getting all this so badly wrong,” Collier told the press.
Meanwhile, former BBC executive Danny Cohen, who also expressed that there is a “institutional crisis” at the outlet, told The Telegraph that the surfacing information reaffirmed his concerns — concerns related to how the network has seemingly turned into a defender of the Islamist terrorist group.
“This appears to be another appalling example of journalistic failure and anti-Israel bias,” he said. “Questions must be asked as to whether the BBC carried out the most basic journalistic checks.”
“License fee payers across the U.K. are being repeatedly conned into paying for Hamas PR. There can be no doubt now that the BBC has a very serious problem with the quality of its journalism and anti-Israel bias.”
The child narrator in the documentary, Abdullah, was also mentioned in a previous BBC piece. He is seen discussing the “devastation in Gaza” in November 2023 while being accompanied by Khalil Abu Shamala, who was introduced to viewers as his “father” — though he actually appears to be his uncle.
Additionally, Shamala appears to be the former director of Al Dameer, an NGO that spearheads campaigns to aid Palestinian prisoners. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terrorist group in the U.S., E.U., Canada, and Israel — is connected to Al Dameer, according to the New York Post.
Regarding the BBC, a number of previous employees of the network have also expressed that the outlet does not allow their writers to define Hamas as “terrorists.”
“Government ministers, newspaper columnists, ordinary people – they’re all asking why the BBC doesn’t say the Hamas gunmen who carried out appalling atrocities in southern Israel are terrorists. The answer goes right back to the BBC‘s founding principles. Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn – who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. We regularly point out that the British and other governments have condemned Hamas as a terrorist organization, but that’s their business,” the BBC’s John Simpson wrote in a previous article.
Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts
Advertisements below