Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit: Guy Smallman/Getty Images
Hundreds attend a protest called by the National Jewish Assembly, the Campaign Against Antisemitism and UK Lawyers for Israel at BBC Broadcasting House in London on Oct. 16, 2023
(JNS) — At least £400,000 (just over $500,000) of license payers’ cash went to the production company behind the controversial British Broadcasting Corporation documentary, “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” British tabloid The Sun reported, citing information obtained from “highly placed sources.”
The BBC had to remove the documentary about the current Israel-Hamas war from its online streaming service last Friday, once it emerged that the child who is a central figure and narrates the documentary is the son of the Hamas Deputy Minister of Agriculture Ayman al-Yazouri.
Investigative journalist David Collier uncovered the link between al-Yazouri and Hamas, a fact not disclosed in the documentary.
Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition and of the Conservative Party, wrote to BBC Director-General Tim Davie, demanding to know whether the broadcaster used license fees paid by the British public to make payments to Hamas.
Badenoch’s letter calls for a probe into any “potential collusion with Hamas” and “the possibility of payment to terrorists.”
The Tory leader has threatened to pull her party’s support for the BBC’s license fee if “serious action” is not taken over the documentary.
Speaking to JNS, Collier said, “We are in a position where license fee money, our money, has been used by the state broadcaster to produce a Hamas propaganda documentary. Worse still, money may actually have changed hands between the BBC and a Hamas official.
“There is no choice but to have a thorough, transparent and independent investigation into exactly what was going on. That a single penny of the BBC’s license fee cash would go to fund a Hamas promotional video would be unacceptable. That it appears £400,000 has done so is beyond sickening. Heads must roll for this,” he said.
Danny Cohen, a former director of BBC television, has also demanded clarity as to who was responsible and whether Hamas was given license cash.
“The BBC needs to account for every penny spent on this documentary — £400,000 is a lot of license-fee payers’ money,” said Cohen.
“They should be transparently told where their money went and whether any of it reached the hands of Hamas. The BBC must also launch a wider investigation into systemic bias against Israel after repeated editorial failures since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacres,” he added.
Lost in translation
The BBC “whitewashed” and covered up jihadist and antisemitic expressions from Gazan Hamas supporters in its controversial documentary “Gaza: How to survive in a war zone,” according to an investigation published on Tuesday in the British newspaper The Telegraph.
Throughout the documentary, the words “Jew” or “Jewish” were translated as “Israel,” “Israeli forces” or removed from subtitles — in at least five instances, The Telegraph reported.
This way, antisemitic statements against Jews would sound like statements against Israel. An interviewee who praised Yahya Sinwar, former Hamas leader, for “jihad against the Jews,” was also mistranslated, as if he were saying “fighting Israeli forces.”
The public broadcaster refuses to refer to Hamas as a terrorist organization. The U.K. proscribed Hamas as a terrorist organization in March 2021.
The Telegraph also reported that a cameraman who worked on the BBC’s Gaza documentary appeared to celebrate the Hamas massacre.
Cameraman’s praise
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) uncovered two tweets by the cameraman, Hatem Rawagh, which appear to praise the Oct. 7 invasion, when Hamas-led terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage.
Rawagh is listed as an additional cameraman in the credits of the film.
On the day of the attack, he seemed to refer to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, tweeting: “Whoever missed Oct 6 [1973] in Egypt …, Oct 7 is happening [now] in Palestine.”
A day later, he shared a video clip posted by Al-Qassam Brigades, the “military” wing of Hamas, filmed from the body camera of a gunman as he fired with a rifle and killed an Israeli in Erez, near the Gaza border.
“You are going to come back to this video a million times,” Rawagh wrote.
The BBC has drawn criticism on many occasions since Oct. 7 for repeatedly blaming Israel for actions taken by Hamas such as the explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 17, 2023.
There have been many other incidents that include the BBC calling Israeli hostages “prisoners”; breaching its own impartiality rules at least 1,553 times; and forbidding staff from joining a march against antisemitism.
In August 2024, more than 200 Jews, including many who work in some capacity with the BBC, accused the public broadcaster of “gaslighting” them in response to their complaints alleging antisemitism.
Sir Michael Ellis, who served as attorney general for England and Wales in 2021 and 2022, said at a Westminster Hall debate in London in February 2024, “The BBC has found itself at the center of ever-increasing controversy in recent years, and it is the organization’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war which has led it to comprehensively fail the British public.”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog has also weighed in on the BBC’s coverage, criticizing the broadcaster for drawing a false equivalence between the treatment of convicted Hamas terrorists by Israel and innocent Israeli hostages abducted into Gaza.
During an interview with Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC’s “Sunday Morning News” on Feb. 2, Herzog called on the broadcaster to end this narrative, emphasizing that Israel is a democracy beholden to the rule of law whereas Hamas engages in barbaric terrorist acts.
“I think that this equality that the BBC is always trying to make is outrageous and preposterous — absolutely not true. We are a democracy. We abide by the rule of law. All prisoners in Israel get whatever is necessary as prisoners under the law, under the supervision of the courts,” said Herzog.
BBC on-air staff have had to apologize on several occasions for incorrect information.
The BBC said it was carrying out “further due diligence” on how the documentary was made.
Members of the British Jewish community and allies protested this week outside BBC headquarters. The protest was organized by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which also demanded transparency on whether any payments made by the BBC for the “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” documentary went to Hamas.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism also called for full and independent inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of the Jewish state.
