The British Broadcasting Corporation (BCC) was forced to apologize and issue a clarification after unintentionally profiling a Hamas member’s son in a Gaza documentary.
On Monday, the network premiered the film “Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone,” which followed four young people with ages ranging from 10-24 living in Gaza during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. One of the subjects included 13-year-old Abdullah, who also narrates the film.
On Friday, the BBC announced the documentary would not be available on its iPlayer during an investigation.
The film soon faced backlash after investigative journalist David Collier revealed that Abdullah was, in fact, the son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.
“We have said that @bbcnews has become a propaganda tool of Hamas. Well here is the proof. Sit down and hold on to something,” he wrote in an X thread on Tuesday.
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On Wednesday, the BBC released a statement saying that it would add a new text to the film clarifying Abdullah’s backstory and apologizing for not doing so beforehand.
“Since the transmission of our documentary on Gaza, the BBC has become aware of the family connections of the film’s narrator, a child called Abdullah,” the clarification read. “We’ve promised our audiences the highest standards of transparency, so it is only right that as a result of this new information, we add some more detail to the film before its retransmission. We apologise for the omission of that detail from the original film.”
The BBC continued, “The new text reads: ‘The narrator of this film is 13-year-old Abdullah. His father has worked as a deputy agriculture minister for the Hamas-run government in Gaza. The production team had full editorial control of filming with Abdullah.’”
On Friday, the BBC offered a new statement indicating the documentary had been removed while the network investigates: “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone features important stories we think should be told – those of the experiences of children in Gaza. There have been continuing questions raised about the programme and in the light of these, we are conducting further due diligence with the production company. The programme will not be available on iPlayer while this is taking place.”
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British Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy revealed to LBC, a British talk radio station, that she plans to meet with the BBC heads to discuss the film.
“I watched it last night. It’s something that I will be discussing with them, particularly around the way in which they sourced the people who were featured in the program,” Nandy said.
She continued, “These things are difficult, and I do want to acknowledge that for the BBC, they take more care than most broadcasters in terms of the way that they try to portray these things. They’ve been attacked for being too pro-Gaza, they’ve been attacked for being anti-Gaza. But it is absolutely essential that we get this right.”
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Multiple British TV figures wrote to the BBC questioning the editorial standards behind the project and called for it to be taken off-air and removed from its platforms. As the BBC itself explained, this included a letter from actress Tracy-Ann Oberman, “Strike” producer Neil Blair, former BBC One controller Danny Cohen and producer Leo Pearlman calling for an investigation.
“If the BBC was aware that Abdullah Al-Yazouri was the son of a terrorist leader, why was this not disclosed to audiences during the programme?” they wrote. “If the BBC was not aware that Abdullah Al-Yazouri is the son of a terrorist leader, what diligence checks were undertaken and why did they fail?”
“Given the serious nature of these concerns, the BBC should immediately postpone any broadcast repeats of the programme, remove it from iPlayer and take down any social media clips of the programme until an independent investigation is carried out and its findings published with full transparency for licence-fee payers,” they demanded.
The BBC faced repeated backlash for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and its unwillingness to describe Hamas as “terrorists.”
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