Pro-Israel activists protest at BBC over Hamas-linked documentary

Campaign Against Antisemitism and supporters demanded transparency and an inquiry.

 BBC New Broadcasting House in London. (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
BBC New Broadcasting House in London.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Pro-Israel activists protested outside the British Broadcasting Corporation’s London Broadcasting House on Tuesday night in response to revelations that the state broadcaster produced a Gaza documentary featuring people tied to Hamas.

Activists and supporters, including Campaign Against Antisemitism, demanded transparency and an inquiry into the possibility that any of the £400,000 worth of license-fee funds used to produce the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was paid to Hamas officials.

“The BBC has become a mouthpiece for terror,” CAA CEO Gideon Falter said at the event. “It cannot call terrorism by its name. The BBC has become a spokesperson for terrorists.” CAA argued on X/Twitter that the BBC could not be trusted to review its own mistakes and respond to complaints and should be regulated in the same manner as other broadcasters.

Researcher David Collier, who was the first to discover Hamas ties to the documentary aired last Monday, spoke at the rally and, according to CAA, said that the BBC only removed the production on Friday because they had been caught. 

Abdullah Al-Yazouri, the son of a senior Hamas official, who narrated the BBC documentary. (credit: screenshot)
Abdullah Al-Yazouri, the son of a senior Hamas official, who narrated the BBC documentary. (credit: screenshot)

They did not even take it down because it featured continuity issues and children reading from their Hamas-written scripts.”

Last Tuesday, Collier said that the father of the show’s narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazouri, was a senior Hamas official. The father of another child featured in the film was a Hamas police officer. Collier also claimed that the cameramen had praised terrorist attacks in Israel.

Following Collier’s report, Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch sent a letter to BBC director-general Tim Davie calling for an investigation to be opened to explore the possibilities that the BBC paid and colluded with Hamas officials to produce the documentary following the wartime lives of four Gaza youths.

Conservative MP Suella Braverman questioned on X on Monday how the state broadcaster had failed to perform checks that resulted in it publishing a “propaganda film for a terrorist organization that wants to wipe Jewish people from the earth.”

BBC on documentary

According to Badenoch, BBC was defensive about the documentary, assuring that it complied with usual compliance procedures and kept the program available on its website. As of press time, the documentary has been delisted from the BBC iPlayer.

Board of Deputies of British Jews President Phil Rosenberg said on Monday that he was concerned about the approach that the BBC held toward Hamas and added his voice to the growing chorus for an independent inquiry into the culture and personnel of the broadcaster.


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Badenoch added on Sunday that an inquiry into the BBC would have to explore the “repeated and serious allegations of systemic and institutional bias against Israel in the BBC’s coverage of the war.”

This allegedly included false equivalence between Israel and Hamas, bias at BBC Arabic, and interviews in which there were robust interrogations of Israeli representatives while Palestinian officials were met with no challenge.