Following its broadcast of a documentary about the Gaza Strip 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.  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.  The BBC mad a big mistake.

     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.