1,500 Breaches of Editorial Guidelines: BBC Excoriated in Scathing Report on Israel-Hamas War Coverage

On December 6,2023, HonestReporting highlighted significant issues with the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, nearly three months after the October 7 Hamas massacre.

After multiple serious violations of its editorial guidelines by journalists covering the conflict, we questioned whether the publicly-funded broadcaster’s reputation could recover. We also called out the corporation’s unconvincing defense of its editorial mistakes, as the BBC sought to justify its errors by claiming that its journalists were “reporting in difficult and dangerous conditions.”

This excuse was particularly troubling in the case of Jon Donnison’s coverage of the Al-Ahli Hospital incident, especially given that Donnison was reporting from Jerusalem, not Gaza.

The BBC’s coverage has shown little improvement since then, with HonestReporting repeatedly exposing further breaches of the corporation’s guidelines in its coverage of Israel (see here, here, and here).

This week, a damning report exposed the full extent of the BBC’s anti-Israel bias during the Israel-Hamas war.

The analysis, spanning four months of the broadcaster’s coverage starting on October 7, uncovered a staggering 1,500 breaches of the BBC’s editorial guidelines and highlighted systemic failures to maintain its commitment to impartiality and accuracy during a conflict that has fueled a troubling rise of antisemitic bigotry worldwide.

The BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times at the height of Israel’s war against Hamas according to this professional study in the @Telegraph: #BBCbiashttps://t.co/M6feRf7dPT

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 8, 2024

The 199-page report, reviewed by HonestReporting, was the result of an extensive investigation carried out by a team of around 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists, led by UK lawyer Trevor Asserson and his firm. The findings expose significant bias, with a consistent pattern of language and reporting that favored Palestinian narratives while downplaying or misrepresenting key facts about the conflict:

• Broadcast of False Information — The Al-Ahli Hospital Incident

One of the most notable examples of the BBC’s reporting failures involved the Al-Ahli Hospital blast in Gaza on October 17, 2023. BBC correspondent Jon Donnison, reporting live, speculated that an Israeli airstrike was the most likely cause of the explosion that he claimed had killed 500 people. However, it soon emerged that the explosion occurred in the hospital’s grounds and was caused by a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad, not an Israeli airstrike. Despite this, Donnison stated, “it is hard to see what else this could really be other than an Israeli airstrike.” Even after the truth was established, the BBC delayed issuing a clear correction.

• Repeated Failure to Label Hamas a Terrorist Organization

Throughout its coverage, the BBC refused to refer to Hamas as a terrorist organization, despite its official designation as such by numerous countries, including the UK.

Instead, the BBC often portrayed Hamas in sympathetic terms, framing the group as a “resistance movement” and its fighters as “soldiers.”

This failure to accurately label Hamas contributed to a skewed portrayal of the conflict, in which the brutality of Hamas’ attacks, including the kidnapping of over 250 Israelis, was downplayed or presented in a neutral tone.

Particularly outrageous was a headline describing Hamas’s October 7 attack as a “spectacular” operation.

According to @BBCNews, “It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn – who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”

And yet the BBC does a damn good job of portraying Israel as the bad guys. https://t.co/syr6Kvi2ys

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 11, 2023

• Glorification of Hamas in BBC Arabic Coverage

In BBC Arabic coverage, the glorification of Hamas was even more pronounced.

For example, a report from October 8, 2023, showed celebratory scenes in Ramallah, with residents handing out sweets following Hamas’ attack on Israel. Rather than questioning or contextualizing these celebrations, the BBC Arabic segment amplified Hamas’s propaganda under the headline: “Hamas’s military prowess has shocked Israelis.”

Why does @BBCArabic cameraman Jehad El-Mashhrawi omit that the tragic death of his son in 2012 was the result of a misfired Palestinian rocket?

Is there anything else he omits in his heartbreaking firsthand Gaza experience in order to blame Israel?https://t.co/F2Xh01lpLc

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 21, 2023

• Sympathy Imbalance in Favor of Palestinians

The report used artificial intelligence to calculate a “sympathy ratio” in the BBC’s coverage, revealing a stark imbalance favoring the Palestinian narrative. Headlines and body text overwhelmingly evoked sympathy for Palestinian casualties, while the suffering of Israeli victims was largely ignored or downplayed. Even when articles did include sympathy for Israel, it was often buried deep within the text, whereas sympathy for Palestinians was prominently displayed in the headlines.

This was especially evident in the coverage following the October 7 massacre, where, despite the unprecedented brutality of this attack, the BBC focused disproportionately on Israel’s immediate military response.

“Palestinian forces.”

Is this how you describe armed Hamas terrorists, @BBCWorld?

And you seem to have forgotten the bit where they infiltrated Israeli villages and towns, murdering and kidnapping Israeli men, women and children. It was more than just a rocket attack. https://t.co/AgLeA1nrk9

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 7, 2023

• Inconsistent and Inadequate Corrections

The BBC’s failure to issue prompt and transparent corrections for its reporting mistakes was another critical issue highlighted in the report. In one example, after falsely reporting that Israel had executed 137 Palestinian civilians, this inaccurate information was repeated in six different broadcasts before the BBC finally issued a correction — 12 days later.

• Downplaying Palestinian Terrorism

The BBC has consistently downplayed Palestinian terrorism while portraying Israel as a militaristic, aggressive nation. According to the report, the BBC suggested that Israel faced “no substantial threat,” effectively delegitimizing Israel’s right to defend itself. By contrast, the coverage of Hamas’s military strength and its role as a terror organization received far less attention.

• Misleading Comparisons in Coverage

The report highlighted a specific example from BBC Arabic in November 2023, where a roundup of newspaper coverage contrasted a photograph of a Gazan girl after an air raid with a photo of an ultra-Orthodox Jew carrying a machine gun. The context of the second image was entirely omitted: the man was returning from the funeral of a Jewish student shot by Palestinians in the West Bank.

Furthermore, the photo was taken in October 2000, more than two decades before October 7, 2023.

• Minimizing Israeli Victims

The BBC’s coverage frequently minimized the suffering of Israeli victims while giving detailed attention to Palestinian casualties. For example, a picture of Israeli hostage Noa Argamani used by the BBC on January 1, 2024, showed her smiling before the war, rather than the distressing image of her abduction by Hamas, which had been widely circulated.

Yet, even in the face of the evidence presented in the Asserson report, the BBC continues to deny that there is any substantial problem with its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

In response, the BBC stated it would “carefully consider” the findings but quickly moved to undermine the credibility of the research, questioning both the methodology and the use of AI. In the BBC’s typical evasive fashion, a spokesman for the corporation told The Telegraph: “We don’t think coverage can be assessed solely by counting particular words divorced from context.”

The corporation’s World Affairs editor, John Simpson, who previously justified the BBC’s refusal to call Hamas terrorists by stating, “It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn,” also dismissed the Asserson report on X.

The BBC says it has serious questions about the methodology of the attack on BBC reporting of Gaza in today’s Sunday Telegraph. Jeremy Bowen and Lyse Doucet, who are singled out for vicious criticism, are known worldwide as two of the finest correspondents in world journalism.

— John Simpson (@JohnSimpsonNews) September 8, 2024

His statement perfectly illustrates the BBC’s ongoing issue of prioritizing neutrality over accuracy, and creating the false impression of two equal sides where none exists. This approach has long been part of the BBC’s defense, and Simpson’s justification for his employer mirrors the broadcaster’s broader reluctance to admit bias, even when faced with undeniable evidence.

This denial is not a new phenomenon.

More than 20 years ago, the Balen report similarly identified bias in the BBC’s coverage of Israel, yet the broadcaster has never released the findings to the public. For years, the BBC has fought legal battles to keep the Balen report under wraps, a telling sign of its damning contents.

The Asserson report is merely the latest in a long line of warnings. It reveals not just isolated errors, but a consistent pattern of bias that undermines the BBC’s journalistic integrity. But how can the BBC begin to address its failings when it refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem?

The question remains: how long can this continue? Can the BBC withstand any further blows to its credibility?

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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