BBC bias: Articles, videos and analyses,

last updated July 2025

Critiques from the early 2000s

From the beginning of the 21st century, the BBC has attracted consistent criticism of its reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Tim Llewellyn worked as a BBC Middle East correspondent between the 1970s and 1990s, a time when it was easier to report the situation objectively than it is now. He became an outspoken critic when, in the early years of this century, the Corporation took a strong pro-Israeli turn.

In early 2025, he reviewed Malcolm Balen’s report that the BBC had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to keep hidden for two decades – and wrote about it in this article. The report was commissioned in 2003, under pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists who thought it would reveal pro-Palestinian bias in BBC reporting, but Balen found no evidence of such bias. Llewellyn infers that the BBC withdrew it out of fear that pro-Israeli lobbyists and pressure groups that had been expecting Balen to find BBC reporting slanted against Israel, would attack the report as a whitewash – with the support of most of the mainstream media.

Balen drew attention to the problem of Zionist pressure, and his report was written around the same time as two much more critical reports, one by the BBC Board of Governors, and another by the Glasgow Media Group (see below). The Board of Governors found that BBC reporting failed to reflect the enormous imbalance in resources and status between Israel and Palestine.

Llewellyn found that since then, BBC reporting had grown even more biased towards Israel. News was shaped defensively to appease critics and pre-empt attacks, and regularly failed to recall the Palestinian history of dispossession, ethnic cleansing and oppression, or Britain’s historic responsibility for it. The current situation was epitomised by the decision to withdraw the documentary film Gaza: How to survive a war zone, ostensibly on the grounds that one of its child narrators was the son of a minor official in the Hamas administration of Gaza.

One of the features of the BBC’s bias has been its failure to interview leading experts in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, people like Avi Shlaim, Illan Pappe or Rashid Khalidi. Another is its scant reporting of the protest movement and non-reporting of the Government’s illicit and vicious clampdown on critical journalists and known campaigners against Israel.
Mike Berry cites four key findings of a major study of the Glasgow Media Group, led by (the now deceased) Greg Philo, about BBC prime time reporting of the Second Intifada:

- Lack of historical context: BBC News had said almost nothing about the history or origins of the conflict. This disadvantaged the Palestinians by removing their rationale for action: to regain lands and homes lost when Israel was created in 1948, and; throw off the military occupation they have been living under since 1967.
- Insufficient reporting of what the military occupation involved for Palestinians, such as theft of land and water, restrictions on movement and being subject to detention without trial and torture.
- Israelis were given more airtime than Palestinians and journalists frequently inserted their rationales and perspectives into coverage.
- Israeli and Palestinian casualties were treated differently. Israeli victims received more airtime than Palestinians, and their deaths were described using different language like "atrocity", "murder" and "massacre", whereas Palestinians merely "died" or "were killed".

In 2006, shortly after this study was published, research commissioned by the BBC’s Board of Governors and carried out by Loughborough University confirmed many of its key findings. Berry also cites a report that the BBC commissioned from an independent panel that highlighted the corporation’s failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation and stressed the BBC’s need to fill in the gaps, most obviously in respect of context and history.

More recent critiques

Chris Friel, 2022: BBC coverage of Jewish Labour Movement and Jewish Voice for Labour is biased against JVL Friel offers a painstaking comparison of BBC coverage of the two rival Jewish groups. Broadly speaking, the JLM is Zionist, while JVL is Israel-critical. What is striking in Friel’s analysis is the disproportion in the level of coverage – JLM receives much more coverage than JVL. This is all the more disturbing given that JLM, having been dormant for many years, was only briefly reawakened at the time of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party which it systematically attacked as antisemitic. After Corbyn ceased to be leader, it lapsed back into dormancy, while JVL, initially formed to counter JLM and its weaponisation of allegations of antisemitism, has maintained a steady level of activity and a flourishing intellectual life, and runs a thought-provoking website with a constant flow of high-quality posts.

CAMPAIN, 9-2-2023: Open letter to Tim Davie. CAMPAIN complained that the BBC had failed to act with due impartiality and accuracy in reporting allegations about the scale of antisemitism in the Labour Party. 1,440 license-fee payers eventually signed the letter. In their submission, they cited both:

specific cases of erroneous reporting, in BBC News, Newsnight and the Panorama documentary Is Labour Antisemitic? of July 2019, which was screened five months before the General election of that year, and
the BBC’s failure to report important facts, notably to meaningfully respond to very serious allegations in the Al Jazeera Labour Files series, and to shine an investigatory light on the interest groups and lobbyists behind the stream of accusations about antisemitism.

Jonathan Coulter reports on CAMPAIN's experience in an article of Jan 2025 in which he describes both the BBC and Ofcom stonewalling the Open Letter to Tim Davie. They had refused to examine the copious evidence presented, and not reviewed or even referenced a series of highly relevant publications on the topic. They had flouted the BBC’s own editorial guidelines, misusing the concept of editorial freedom to justify reporting one side of the argument while systematically ignoring contrary evidence. They had moreover proved unwilling to use their discretion to investigate serious complaints that do not fall within their own tightly defined rules.

Centre for Media Monitoring, March 2024: Media Bias, Gaza, 2023-4 The Centre for Media Monitoring is a project of the Muslim Council of Britain, and exists to monitor British media coverage of Muslims and of Islam. This 150-page report, which covers all of the mainstream media including the BBC, goes into great detail on the selective use of language to frame Israeli military actions in a more favourable light than those of the Palestinians.

Rumi Ruhayem, BBC correspondent in Beirut, 1-5-2024 Letter to Tim Davie, detailing bias in reporting on Gaza war, May 1st, 2024, and vividly describing the distress of BBC staff at the BBC’s suppression of the harrowing details of Israel’s assault on Gaza (the link is to a repost by Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL)). The letter itself is an internal e-mail which was leaked to Jadaliyya, an online magazine published by the Arab Studies Institute. The JVL post supplies links to the Institute and to the Jadaliyya article containing the letter.

BBC and other journalists, 1-11-2024: Open letter to Tim Davie, complaining of systematic bias, in favour of Israel, in BBC coverage of Israel and Palestine. While more than one hundred of its signatories are believed to be BBC employees, their names had been suppressed from the published letter for fear of reprisals from the BBC hierarchy. The reputations of the other signatories, whose names are published, make clear the letter’s bona fides.

Eight BBC journalists, 23-11-2024, reported by Al Jazeera, said that the BBC was reporting the situation in Israel/Palestine inaccurately, investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims compared with Palestinians, and omitting key historical context in coverage. It was also guilty of a double standard in how civilians are seen, given that it is unflinching in its reporting of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

BRICUP, the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine, 12-12-2024. Letter to Tim Davie, Director General of the BBC, protesting the abrupt disinvitation of the well-known Israeli historian Ilan Pappé on the day he was due to participate in a BBC documentary on Israel and Palestine.

Dropsite News, 19-12-2024: The BBC’s civil war over Gaza, report by Owen Jones. This long report was prepared over many months, and provides overwhelming evidence of bias on the part of the BBC. It brings to light the alarming role of a senior editor, Raffi Berg, who has worked in the past with Mossad and the CIA (see next item), and now has editorial control over most of the BBC’s online coverage of Israel and Palestine. Owen Jones also highlights the role of Sir Robbie Gibb, one of five members of the BBC standards and editorial committee, at the same time figuring as the sole owner of a blatantly partisan newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle (JC). In recent years this newspaper has played a central role in promoting the fear of antisemitism in the UK Jewish community by attributing all criticism of Israel to antisemitism. It has regularly been forced to pay libel damages for its scattershot allegations of antisemitism, principally against figures from the Labour Party, in which it leads the field. It is astonishing that someone associated with such an openly partisan publication should have a directorial role at our supposedly impartial state broadcaster.

Mintpress, 3-1-2025: Raffi Berg, BBC Middle East Editor, exposed as CIA and Mossad collaborator

Declassified UK, 15-1-2025: National Scandal: the BBC’s Gaza cover-up. Examples of items that should have been reported but were not mentioned:

The BBC has reported just four times in 15 months that the Royal Air Force (RAF) has been conducting surveillance flights over Gaza. Only one BBC report on the subject has been written since December 2023, despite hundreds of such spy missions having been conducted, almost daily, in aid of Israeli intelligence. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says these flights are solely to aid the rescue of hostages held by Hamas. Only one BBC online report mentions the UK may be providing targeting information to Israel or flying weapons to the country. None of the articles raised concerns about the UK being willing to collaborate militarily with Israel at a time when it was devastating Gaza.
The BBC failed to report the visit of Israeli General Herzi Halevi, who attended a British military meeting in London in November 2024. Halevi’s visit was highly controversial, given that he had led Israeli military operations throughout its destruction of Gaza.
In June 2025, the New York Times reported that a British intelligence collection team had been present in Israel throughout the war, ostensibly assisting Israeli intelligence in collecting information related to the hostages. This has not been reported on by the BBC.
Neither has the BBC reported on the background to Britain’s military support to Israel. This derives from a Roadmap agreement signed between the two countries a few months before the Hamas attacks of October 2023. The accord committed the two states to tackle shared threats as part of a close strategic partnership, with extensive defence and security cooperation. Another key document is a secret military accord signed by the UK and Israel in December 2020, which was mentioned on social media by Israel but which the UK government has long refused to publish. Declassified UK could find no evidence that BBC journalists had reported either of these two key documents in the corporation’s online news.
There had been no headlines about the possible use of UK arms by Israel in Gaza, or any directly reflecting the repeated calls by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, to halt all UK arms exports and military assistance to Israel.
The prominent legal action against the government for arming Israel brought by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), the Global Legal Action Network and Al-Haq, has been ignored by the BBC. Declassified could find no BBC written coverage of this at all.
The most prominent group challenging British arms exports, the Campaign Against Arms Trade, has been mentioned only six times on the BBC website in 15 months.
Other disturbing aspects of Britain’s arming of Israel, none of which appears to have been covered by the BBC, include Britain continuing to provide military equipment to Israel after announcing limited sanctions last September, allowing UK airspace to be used to supply weapons to Israel, and sending components for F-35 warplanes to the US, where they can be then exported to Israel.
The BBC has not covered the possible role of UK spy agency GCHQ or the army’s special forces, the SAS, in facilitating Israeli military operations. These are live issues given that GCHQ operates an extensive intelligence operation on Cyprus, from where the RAF planes are flown over Gaza. GCHQ is known to have aided past Israeli combat operations in Gaza. Yet Declassified UK could find no reports on the BBC website mentioning GCHQ in the context of Gaza.
Reporting on the SAS was subject to a D-notice – a voluntary government gagging order not to publish sensitive information concerning national security - in October 2023. It followed reporting by The Mail that an SAS team was positioned on Cyprus, reportedly to help rescue British hostages held by Hamas. Since then, it appears the entire UK national media, including the BBC, has complied with this. The BBC has no articles covering or speculating on an SAS role in Israel or Gaza.
The BBC had not reported in its written outputs since October 2023 that the UK was engaged in negotiations with Israel to secure a free trade agreement. Conservative and Labour ministers have since 2022 held five rounds of talks with the Israeli government, whose economy minister, Nir Barkat, is an outspoken supporter of its attacks on Palestinians. Jonathan Reynolds, the current trade minister pursuing the prospective new deal, is a recipient of funding from Britain’s Israel lobby.
The BBC has not reported on the arrests by the UK authorities of pro-Palestinian journalists in Britain. In October 2024, officers from the Metropolitan Police raided the home of Asa Winstanley, a well-known pro-Palestinian journalist with the Electronic Intifada, and seized his devices under provisions of the UK’s Terrorism Act. This , and other similar cases where anti-terror laws were used by the authorities to try to silence pro-Palestinian voices, have not been reported by the BBC. The BBC is not alone: a Google search finds a number of links to articles on the raid, but all are to "alternative" media.
BBC journalists had made no effort to highlight the influence in the UK parliament exercised by the Israel lobby, notably Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). This is a major gap in reporting since these are among the largest lobbying groups in British politics, funding dozens of MPs to go on fact-finding visits to Israel. CFI has been mentioned five times, LFI six times, in BBC reporting in the past 15 months. In no article has the BBC flagged the possible influence of these groups over parliament or government policymaking. Indeed, in the BBC’s written news outputs, the Israel lobby appears not to exist at all: it has been referred to only once, in a report on some graffiti. Yet Declassified UK found that a third of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet, and no less than a quarter of UK MPs overall, have received funding from pro-Israel groups, including LFI.
The BBC reported that former foreign minister Sir Alan Duncan was under investigation by the Conservatives for saying that CFI was doing the bidding of the Israeli prime minister. This was followed by the report stating that The Campaign Against Antisemitism said he was ‘invoking classic antisemitic tropes of Jewish power and disloyalty’. Duncan was later cleared by the Conservatives, but the BBC did not report this online.

OpenDemocracy, 17-1-25, Three academics say why they don’t think the broadcaster is impartial. The three are Des Freedman, Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, Dina Matar, Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media and Chair of Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS, University of London, and Mike Berry, Director of the MA in Political Communication at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture.

Des Freeman highlights contradictory BBC approaches to impartiality – including failure to report relevant facts. Dina Mater questions the impartiality-as-balance paradigm - become more pronounced due to the BBC’s asymmetrical coverage of the war and its apparent reluctance to name Israel directly and immediately as the source of violence.

The Canary, 20-1-2025, reports Norman Thomas, Director of the film Censoring Palestine, saying: It’s no accident that the police, on the pretext of protecting a synagogue, are trying to stop pro-Palestine protesters demonstrating near the BBC offices in London. This is a case of the state trying to shore up censorship in the most blatant and disgraceful way.

Tim Llewellyn’s comment of 3-2-25 on a BBC report of a drone attack on The Conscience ship near Malta. Llewellyn says “as with the murdered Red Cross team in Rafah, and so much else, the BBC tiptoes round any suggestion that the world's most consistent and blatant international law-breaker- - - involving genocide, ethnic cleansing, murder, torture, rape, false imprisonment, land-theft, illegal occupation and settlement at gunpoint, armed attacks on neighbour states - - - might have attacked a civilian ship many hundreds of miles from its shores. A proper journalistic attempt at this egregious use of a Zionist sledgehammer to crack a nut some 800 miles from Israeli shores would be to:

report it straight: Israel bombs civilian aid ship in international waters
ask why it did this. Why not let the boat reach the coast of Israel-occupied Gaza, then board it and seize those on board? Why risk lives?

Answer: because Israel can. It can do what it likes, where it likes with total impunity…………. (quoted from social media with Llewellyn’s permission).

Owen Jones, 8-2-2025 Interviews Aimee Shalan, Chair of the British Palestine Committee and Director of Makan, on BBC bias.

Anchor 1

Skwawkbox, 9-2-25. Video: BBC’s Simmonds at it again – repeating Israeli claims as fact, omitting the obvious. When BBC News presenter Samantha Simmonds reported Israeli prisoners of war were released as part of the ongoing exchange deal, she:

went on about how thin the three men looked but neglected to mention the fact that Israel has been starving Gaza for many months
described released Palestinians as criminals and droned about how awful that must be for Israelis, while neglecting to mention the massive number of arbitrarily detained Palestinian hostages, the torture they face in Israeli concentration camps – which has been condemned by the United Nations – or the suffering of two million Palestinians under Israeli genocide
claimed Israel’s occupation of Gaza ended in the early 2000s despite the finding of the International Court of Justice that it continued unbroken up to this day
claimed 1,200 Israelis were killed by Palestinians when in fact it has been known for more than a year – and was admitted by then-Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant this week – that Israel killed hundreds of its own people in ‘Hannibal’ slaughter attacks.
cut off an expert who put forward clearly inconvenient facts
and more.

As a young person Simmonds, a 2015 Telegraph article confirmed, was a member of Zionist youth group Habonim Dror, which holds Zionism as a central tenet. The conflict of interest between Simmonds’s apparent Zionism and the BBC’s supposed impartiality is not mentioned on any BBC web page that Skwawkbox could find, nor does it appear to be mentioned in the about section of her own website.

Karishma Patel, 5-03-25. I’m a former BBC newsreader – Gaza is the reason I resigned. Karishma was at the BBC for five years, starting out as a researcher and eventually becoming a newsreader and journalist. She relates her frustrating experience of trying to relate the experience of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old girl trapped in a car with her murdered relatives. It was only after the Israeli military killed her, shooting the car 300 times with her inside, that our public broadcaster chose to say her name. And when it did, the article headline didn’t even make clear who had done what. It shied away from coming to a conclusion.

The BBC had failed Palestinian children again in pulling the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, following external pressure over a 13-year-old narrator being related to a deputy agriculture minister in the strip, which is administered by Hamas.

BBC journalists were actively choosing not to follow evidence – out of fear. She said that for months she watched the BBC repeat one of its gravest editorial errors around climate change: debating a phenomenon long after the evidence showed it’s real. The BBC was shying away from reaching reasonable, evidence-based conclusions. Impartiality had failed if its key method is to constantly balance both sides of a story as equally true.

Media Lens, 10-3-24 ‘A Dagger To The Heart’: BBC Credibility Nosedives Even Further. The BBC’s withdrawal of the powerful documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, epitomises how much the UK’s national broadcaster is beholden to the Israel lobby.

At the time of writing this page, the BBC’s withdrawal and suspension of documentaries that are critical of Israel is even more apparent with the suspension of two other documentaries, one dealing with the health system (Gaza, Medics under Fire) and the other dealing with the schools in Gaza.

Jonathan Cook, 10-03-25. New BBC documentary The Road to 7th October is an utter travesty. This documentary starts with a suicide bombing in 2003, during the second Intifada and pays little attention to most of what lies behind Oct 7th, i.e.nearly eight decades of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, dispossession, military occupation and siege of the Palestinian people, supported by the United States.

Cook heavily criticises the producers for making The United States the star of the show, with its officials desperately trying to bring together the two parties, Israel and Fatah (the third party, Hamas, is intentionally sidelined), but finds itself constantly hamstrung by bad luck and the intransigence of those involved. Cook says this, breathes life back into a racist western narrative – one that made the genocide in Gaza possible, and justifies Israel’s return this month to using mass starvation as a weapon of war against the Palestinian people.

It also promotes a view that was supposed to have been laid to rest, in Cook’s opinion, a quarter of a century ago, after the collapse of the Oslo Accords. This view is even more far-fetched in the light of both President Biden and Trumps’ support for the genocidal policies that Israel has pursued since Oct 7th.

Owen Jones, 11-03-25 BBC Presenter RESIGNS Over Israel Bias - And Exposes The TRUTH - w/. Karishma Patel. Jones interviews Patel and explores her experience in considerable depth.

Janta Ka Reporter, 13-04-25, complaining of the BBC highlighting Israeli justification for Israel’s attack of Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. This is compared to the same reporter’s reference to a similar Russian attack on hospital in the region of Sumy, Ukraine.

Soraya Boyd, in a widely-circulated email template for people to write to their MPs. 28-3-25 URGENT COMPLAINT – BBC VIOLATIONS: MISINFORMATION, PROPAGANDA & ISLAMOPHOBIA. Among other things she raises important objections to an article about The Nasser Hospital Attack (by Raffi Berg and Rushdi Abu Alouf), of 23 March 2025, Israel kills Hamas official in strike on Gaza hospital

Legal & Ethical Failures in BBC’s Reporting, including (i) breach of Due Impartiality & Editorial Standards (Ofcom BCAP Code 5.1 & 5.7; BBC Editorial Guidelines Section 4.3.11); (ii) the BBC uncritically amplified Israeli government claims that the strike targeted a Hamas figure without independent verification; (iii) these unverified allegations were presented as factual, constituting misinformation and propaganda rather than objective journalism, and; (iv) the omission of key facts—including the deaths of civilians and medical personnel—misled the public and distorted reality
Re sanitization of War Crimes (Ofcom BCAP Code 2.3 & 3.2; Geneva Conventions, Article 18), including: (i) under Article 18 of the Geneva Conventions, hospitals are protected civilian structures, and targeting them constitutes a war crime; (ii) the BBC failed to provide necessary legal context, thereby whitewashing an unlawful attack as a routine military operation. and: (3) the fact that the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported 654 attacks on Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure since October 2023. (www.who.int/emergencies/situations/Gaza-strip-crisis)
Failure to Report Civilian Casualties Accurately (Ofcom BCAP Code 2.2 & 2.4; UN Human Rights Reporting Standards), including: (i) on 23 March alone, 730 Palestinian civilians were killed, yet the BBC buried this statistic deep within the article, thereby downplaying the scale of the atrocity. and; (2) multiple independent sources, including the Gaza Health Ministry, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), and the UN, confirmed that the hospital was operational at the time of the strike, contradicting Israeli claims.

Owen Jones, 24-4-2025 Gary Lineker shames BBC over Gaza bias. Lineker totally outflanked his interviewer Amol Rajan, when discussing impartiality and balanced reporting. At the core of Lineker’s argument are a few simple statements, notably:

What's going on there (Gaza), the mass murder of thousands of children is something we should have an opinion on, and;
If it’s raining outside, you don’t need someone outside to tell you it’s not raining.

Richard Sanders commented on X that: this is absolutely humiliating – Amol Raja, who, as a presenter on the Today Programme, has one of the most powerful jobs in the British media, lectured on basic journalism by a man whose job it is to talk about football. Rajan’s comments encapsulate everything that is wrong with the BBC’s coverage of Gaza. Impartiality doesn’t involve identifying two political positions and coming down halfway between them. As Gary Lineker has to point out to him – it’s to do with facts.

The New Arab, 5-5-25, Gaza: Medics Under Fire documentary postponed by BBC after review. A documentary about the plight of medics in Gaza during Israel's war on the Palestinian enclave has been delayed by the BBC.

Jonathan Cook, 14-05-25 Jeremy Bowen's interview with Gaza aid chief was shameful – and he knows it. Bowen is widely regarded as one of the more objective BBC reporters. However, Cook takes him to task for prefacing his interview with the Head of UNRWA, Lazarrini, with an utterly unwarranted disclaimer – as though he was talking to a terrorist, not a leading human rights advocate who has been desperately trying to keep the last aid life-lines open to the people of Gaza as they are being actively starved to death by Israel. By doing this, Bowen was bolstering the Israeli narrative that UNRWA is a front for Hamas.

Media Lens, 19-05-25 Genocide in Gaza: The BBC’s Self-Inflicted ‘Trust Crisis’. This article summarises recent information exposing BBC’s bias:

The withdrawal of the BBC-commissioned powerful documentary, ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’, from iPlayer. This happened when it emerged that the film’s narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazuri, is the son of Ayman al-Yazuri, a deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s government which is administered by Hamas, and following a determined pro-Israeli campaign.
Holding back the broadcast of another documentary, Gaza, Medics Under Fire, made by Oscar-nominated and award-winning filmmakers, even though it had been signed off by BBC lawyers. The film includes the testimony of Palestinian doctors working in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. It has been ready for broadcast since February after months of editorial reviews and fact-checking.
An Open letter by 600 prominent figures from the arts and media, including Mike Leigh, Susan Sarandon and Lindsey Hilsum, criticising the BBC for withholding the documentary Gaza, Medics under Fire.
dismissive treatment by senior BBC management of serious concerns about bias raised by their own journalists. Media Lens highlights the writing of Karishma Patel, a former BBC researcher, newsreader and journalist about her reasons for leaving the BBC. She observed ‘a shocking level of editorial inconsistency’ in how the BBC covers Gaza. Journalists were ‘actively choosing not to follow evidence’ of Israeli war crimes ‘out of fear’.
A statement by Richard Sanders, an experienced journalist and documentary filmmaker, who noted via X on 15 May that the BBC had included in its reporting a statement about the capture of US-Israel dual citizen, Edan Alexander, that it knew to be untrue.
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor and supposedly an exemplar of the gold standard of reporting, capitulating to the Israel lobby in his interviews and articles. This is notably the case in a clip where he demurs in describing Israel’s actions as ethnic cleansing. Jonathan Cook draws attention to Bowen introducing the Head of the UN Refugee Agency (UNRWA) with a contorted cautionary statement, while observing that Bowen would never preface an interview with Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), in a similar way.
Propaganda by omission, for example, cited here, here and in this newspiece from Dropsite News. Dropsite points to the BBC blanking news about the murder of Mohammed Bardawil, a 12-year-old boy who was one of only four surviving eyewitnesses of the Israeli military’s execution of 15 paramedics, rescue workers and UN staff in Rafah, Gaza, in March 2025.
Lack of transparency in BBC operations, given that it held a secret meeting with one of Israel’s top military officers during Israel’s war against Gaza. Declassified UK reported in February 2025 that BBC, Guardian and Financial Times editors had secret meetings with Israeli General Aviv Kohavi one month after Israel began to bombard Gaza. Of course there is a place for off-the-record briefings in journalism, but these meetings took place when the Israeli forces had killed over 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and Israeli officials had made several public statements of genocidal intent.

16-6-2025, Centre for Media Monitoring of the Muslim Council of Great Britain releases new report, BBC On Gaza-Israel: One Story, Double Standard. This is a major piece of work, and too long to comment on in any detail here. Here is a useful Novara Media summary. And this article by Jonathan Coulter, published by Jewish Voice for Labour, is a useful guide to the highlights of the report.

Guardian, 20-6-2025 BBC drops Gaza medics documentary over impartiality concerns The BBC announces openly that it has decided not to show the documentary over concerns that it might create an impression of bias. The reason is shameful: that showing an important and challenging film might create an impression of bias is a feeble and supine reason for shelving it. On the BBC’s reasoning, Zola would never have published “J’Accuse”. And the BBC itself would have withheld the Panorama documentary “Is the Labour Party Antisemitic?”, since it created a strong (and in that case correct) impression of bias. The BBC seems to be unconcerned that not showing this film gives a very strong impression of bias; but perhaps it is not concerned with the views or feelings of those who would see bias in this act of suppression.

21-6-2025, Prospect Magazine, Why allegations of BBC bias on Israel are becoming hard to reconcile, by Alan Rusbridger, editor of Prospect and former edit of the Guardian. This article examines allegations of bias both for and against Israel, and refers in particular to the Asserson Report, mentioned in the next section ("Allegations of BBC bias against Israel").

Deadline magazine, 24-6-2025, BBC staff in open revolt over coverage of Gaza and suppression of documentary on medics in Gaza.

Guardian, 2-7-2025, More than 400 media figures urge BBC board to remove Robbie Gibb over Gaza. Robbie Gibb is the head of a consortium which owns the Jewish Chronicle, which for decades has been at the forefront of efforts to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Guardian, 2-7-2025 BBC cowardice over Gaza. Former BBC journalist Karishma Patel describes her efforts from within the BBC to persuade its into reporting the facts about Israel’s war on Gaza. These include the open letter to Director General Tim Davie referred to above with date 1-11-2024.

Guardian, 3-7-2025 Review of Doctors Under Attack after its showing on Channel 4. Stuart Heritage gives it five stars and says “its relentless timeline of horrors will never leave you”.

Guardian, 4-7-2025 Gaza film producer accuses BBC of trying to gag him. The producer of the film Doctors Under Attack that was dropped by the BBC has accused the corporation of trying to gag him and others over its decision not to show the documentary.

Guardian, July 5th 2025 Lisa Nandy calls for BBC sackings (over film revealing truth about genocide in Gaza). Excuse the irony. Not exactly evidence of BBC bias, but of the mindset that allows this bias to flourish.

Guardian, July 15th 2025 The BBC has alienated everyone with its Gaza coverage. After this latest failure, who will be left to defend it? by Owen Jones.

Owen Jones, Battle Lines, August 20th 2025 The BBC hides truth about Israel's genocide - again. This concerns a statement by Retired General Aharon Haliva, recently broadcast on Israel's Channel 12 TV station. Haliva, one of the most senior Israeli generals, declared that for every person killed on 7th October, 50 Palestinians must die and “it does not matter now if they are children.”It was “necessary” because it was a “message to future generations” of Palestinians. The statement was reported in the Jerusalem Post and the Guardian, but not by the BBC.

Re allegations of BBC bias against Israel

Trevor Asserson, undated but published some time in 2024: The Asserson Report – The Israel-Hamas war and the BBC. Asserson alleged multiple breaches of the BBC’s impartiality regulations and claimed that the BBC was heavily biased against Israel. Asserson’s report was extensively covered in right-wing news outlets, including the Express, Mail, Sun, Jewish Chronicle and Spiked as well as on GB News and Talk TV. This played out internationally with coverage in the Jerusalem Post, New York Post and Variety. Yet the comprehensive analysis of UK news reporting of Gaza published by the Centre for Media Monitoring in March 2024 (see above) came to quite different conclusions – that there have been repeated misrepresentation of Palestinian perspectives – received no attention at all in mainstream media at the time.

Des Freeman, of the Media Reform Coalition, 13-9-2024 BBC, Bias and Gaza, a partial study in impartiality. Freeman heavily critiqued Asserson’s approach and methodology. Some idea of the quality of Asserson’s research can be gleaned from the fact that he complained of the BBC’s failure to refer systematically to Hamas as a terrorist organisation, despite there being no international consensus among journalists about this description. Likewise, he complained that the BBC did not sufficiently acknowledge what he claims is the Hamas-induced lack of journalistic freedom inside Gaza, while failing to mention the forced exclusion by Israel of all foreign journalists from Gaza. Such observations suggest that the Asserson Report does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Jewish Board of Deputies (BoD), 21-03-25. Board of Deputies calls for BBC to commit to a clear series of actions on content and culture by Passover. The BoD claimed that the British Jewish community had long been sounding the alarm regarding BBC misreporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It drew particular attention to “a situation where the son of a senior Hamas official narrated its recent documentary (Gaza, how to survive a warzone). It demanded a series of corrective actions in advance of the Passover festival in mid-April 2025.