I didn’t sleep at all on Monday night. I had watched BBC2’s documentary on Gaza and then had begun to look more closely at the children the BBC had placed in front of the camera inside it. One of them in particular had stood out, and the more I scratched away at the identity of the narrator Abdullah, the more astonished I became.
It had started at about 11pm with me being led astray by a mistaken identity. In a news clip about Gaza in November 2023, Channel 4 had also featured Abdullah – but had misnamed him, and even claimed another man (who turned out to be his uncle) was his father.
But by 1am I had his real name. By 3am I had identified his father and realised the Hamas connection. And from there until I published my findings at 7am, I kept going back over every small detail because I simply could not believe the enormity of the error the BBC producers had made.
The BBC had used the son of a Hamas government minister as the narrator for their documentary – and neglected to tell the audience.
As my post about all this went viral on X, and news of the error began to circulate publicly – the BBC quickly scrambled into defensive mode. Initially they said they had ‘full editorial control’ – then they began to backpedal and lay the blame at the door of the independent production company – and eventually they apologised for the oversight (yet still refused to take the programme offline).
But the apology just does not even begin to address the problem. The BBC clarification claimed that they did not know that Abdullah’s father was Ayman Alyazuri – the Deputy Agricultural Minister in Gaza. But how can the BBC possibly spend months following a child around in Gaza and put him on camera – without knowing who the child’s father is? Where is the safeguarding?
David Collier
It took me just 10 hours to watch the documentary, find major problems, and publish my findings. In addition, everything I found was publicly available. This means that the BBC cannot possibly have undertaken the most basic checks that are demanded in its own editorial guidelines.
Let’s be clear. This is not the first time the BBC has been caught publishing things it should not, nor is it even the first time the BBC has apologised. But it is the size of the error, the number of mistakes, and the fact that this time, there is simply no excuse whatsoever – that makes the episode a landmark one that will long be remembered.
The fact that the BBC used a Hamas family member to narrate the documentary exposes a catastrophic failure by the BBC to understand the difficulties of reporting news from Gaza – or to appreciate the depth of Hamas control of Gaza – and it therefore brings into question every report they have produced since October 7. The BBC’s news gathering pipeline from Gaza is clearly not fit for purpose.
Since I published the original piece, additional problems have been found with a second child as pictures emerged of this child with weapons and a Hamas fighter.
Questions have also been raised about continuity in the documentary and manipulated footage. Another person featured made triumphant posts on her social media following a brutal terror attack that murdered seven Jews in Jerusalem in January 2023.
And one of the two cameramen even posted a celebration on October 7. The longer this goes on – the more it begins to look like the BBC has been duped into producing a propaganda video for a radical Islamic terror group.
We have the right to demand answers, and in this case expect full transparency in the response. What safeguards were there over the use of children? Did the BBC hand money or gifts to the family of a Hamas minister? Who knew what and when?
As a first step, the BBC must obviously pull the documentary. If BBC executives really did not know that the star of the show was the son of a Hamas minister – then logically they cannot possibly know whether elements of the show have been choreographed by Hamas activists. There is no choice but to take the program down.
- David Collier is an investigative journalist
