The BBC has not had a ‘good war’ since 7 October. Whether it is the smug anti-Israel tone of its reporters, or its use of casualty numbers and narratives dished out by a terror group, it has been pretty shameful stuff. And I say that as someone who generally has a lot of time for the corporation. 

Today, things reached a new low. We finally got the full report into the documentary ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’. The show was broadcast on BBC Two and iPlayer in February before being pulled. It emerged that the 13-year-old narrator just happened to be the son of the deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas government, something the audience were never told. The investigation, carried out by Peter Johnston, Director of Editorial Complaints and Reviews, found that ‘regardless of how the significance or otherwise of the narrator’s father’s position was judged, the audience should have been informed about this’.

You reckon?

The BBC insists that it was not told who the narrator’s father was, although three people at HOYO Films, the independent production company who made the documentary, knew. Worse, it seems that nobody at the Beeb was that interested in finding out. As the report puts it, the BBC team was not ‘sufficiently proactive’. 

That is pathetic, at best, and deliberately negligent at worse. Given we know that Hamas, a proscribed terror organisation, runs all aspects of the Gaza Strip, why did nobody think to check what connections this child had?

The answer is obvious. Why question anything too much if it makes Israel look bad?

While the BBC insists that nobody subject to financial sanctions received money as part of the production process, the narrator was paid £795 for his time. So, money did go to a Hamas minister’s family and it’s hard to believe it stayed in this child’s piggy bank. I wonder how much concrete for a terror tunnel you can get for £795 these days. Maybe you can get it cheap via the UN.

The report also found no evidence ‘to support a suggestion that the narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the programme in any way’. Terrorist organisations are, of course, well known for their lack of influence on family members and so even in something scripted, as this narrator’s contribution was, this seems a nonsensical argument. It seems to me that terrorists don’t need to be explicit to influence someone’s behaviour, especially if it is a close family member.

Commenting on the latest scandal engulfing his ex-employer, former director of BBC Television Danny Cohen said:

The serious journalistic failings of this documentary have severely damaged public trust in the BBC. This is not an isolated incident but part of a pattern of systemic bias in the BBC’s coverage of the war.

Cohen is right. This is far from the only such incident during this terrible war. Remember when correspondent Jon Donnison announced live on air that it was “hard to see” that anyone but the IDF could have bombed a hospital in Gaza? It subsequently emerged that that the missile had been fired from inside Gaza i.e. it had been fired by Hamas or another terror group in the territory. That was 10 days after Hamas conducted its massacre.

We’ve also had Jeremy Bowen suggest that a hoard of weapons found by the IDF in a hospital might have simply been the armoury of the site’s security team, not terrorists using civilian infrastructure to hide their arms.  It’s all so ridiculous that it would be laughable if it were not so dangerous.

Cohen believes that ‘the BBC’s failure to recognise this [pattern] and take real action is a serious leadership failure,” adding that ‘statements from the BBC that it takes antisemitism seriously have become utterly meaningless’. It is hard to disagree.

The BBC leadership will no doubt continue to highlight that the only breach of its editorial guidelines found was not declaring who the narrator was, as if that is not serious enough. The fact that this report found no impartiality issues will be of no comfort to most of the UK’s Jewish population, who have felt let down by the national broadcaster for almost two years – including during its nonsensical coverage of Glastonbury recently.

In its response to today’s report, the BBC also flags that it and other journalistic organisations are not allowed into Gaza. That’s a serious issue, one worthy of separate discussion and that I have mixed feelings about. However, in this instance it is a deflection that has nothing to do with the sheer incompetence by the corporation in this and other instances. Just because you cannot go into a complex, dangerous warzone, it doesn’t mean you need to regurgitate propaganda put out by terrorists or hide key facts from your viewers.

After this latest fiasco, the BBC needs to take a good hard look at itself. But it probably won’t.