Palestinian child in Gaza documentary row holds BBC responsible for fate
Abdullah al-Yazuri, the narrator in the documentary ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’
Khaled Shalaby and Imran Mulla report in Middle East Eye on 5 March 2025:
Abdullah al-Yazuri is 13 years old and has witnessed death and devastation on a scale that most could never imagine. Having survived Israel’s deadly war on Gaza, which has killed at least 48,380 Palestinians so far, Abdullah’s dream is to study journalism in distant Britain, where his father got his PhD.
But in recent weeks, Abdullah has found himself at the centre of a national row in Britain, triggered by his role narrating a BBC documentary on Gaza’s children, ‘Gaza: How To Survive a Warzone’.
Speaking to Middle East Eye this week, Abdullah described spending hours being filmed in the besieged enclave during the war. He said that he had hoped that the documentary could “spread the message of the suffering that children in Gaza witness”.
Instead, just four days after the documentary aired on 17 February, the BBC pulled it from its streaming platform, iPlayer, after an intense campaign by pro-Israel groups and rival British media outlets.
Their criticism centred over revelations that Abdullah’s father, Ayman al-Yazuri, is a deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s government, which is administered by Hamas. Yazuri has been widely labelled a “Hamas chief”, “Hamas official” and “terror chief” by commentators and news organisations in Britain.
But MEE revealed on 20 February that Yazuri was in fact a technocrat with a scientific rather than political background and had previously worked for the UAE’s education ministry and studied at British universities. inisters, bureaucrats and civil servants in Gaza are appointed by Hamas, while in the West Bank they are appointed by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
The withdrawal of the documentary was coupled with torrents of online harassment and abuse targeting Abdullah and his family.
“I’ve been working for over nine months on this documentary for it to just get wiped and deleted… it was very sad to me.” Abdullah, who had spent around 60 hours obtaining footage, said.
“It was pretty disappointing and sad to see this backlash against me and my family, and this harassment,” he continued, adding: “Some anonymous people, let’s say, had tried to hide the true suffering of Gaza’s children by attacking me and my family.”