BBC coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza ‘systematically biased against Palestinians’
A handout picture released by the BBC taken on 15 June 2025, Israel’s UK ambassador Tzipura Hotovely speaking on the BBC’s ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’
Oscar Rickett reports in Middle East Eye on 17 June 2025:
The BBC’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza is “systematically biased against Palestinians”, according to an analysis of over 35,000 pieces of content produced by the UK’s public broadcaster.
The study, conducted by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring (CFMM), which monitors how the national media reports on Islam and Muslims, found that the BBC gives Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage than Palestinian ones.
In an analysis of 3,873 articles and 32,092 broadcast segments from 7 October 2023 to 6 October 2024, the CFMM found that the BBC used emotive terms four times as much for Israeli victims and applied “massacre” 18 times more to Israeli casualties than Palestinian ones.
According to its authors, the report “reveals a systematic omission of key historical and contemporary context that has acquired an institutional quality at the BBC”, including the genocidal rhetoric used by Israeli leaders – notably Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog – and a failure to scrutinise Israeli claims and denials.
While the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October were referenced in at least 40 percent of the BBC’s online coverage, just 0.5 percent of articles mentioned Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
According to the analysis, the BBC pressed a total of 38 interviewees to condemn the 7 October attacks, but at no point applied the equivalent questioning to Israeli actions. BBC presenters have referred to “Hamas-controlled Gaza”, despite Israeli forces now controlling more than half of the devastated enclave.
The study also found that the BBC had interviewed significantly more Israelis (2,350) than Palestinians (1,085) on TV and radio, while BBC presenters shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian perspective (2,340 v 217).
Unrest at the BBC
The report comes as the BBC continues to withhold the release of Gaza: Medics Under Fire, a documentary it commissioned that tells the story of Palestinian doctors working in Gaza.
Despite being signed off by the British broadcaster’s lawyers, the film has not been aired because of a furore that erupted over How to Survive a Warzone, another BBC documentary on children in Gaza. The film did not mention that the father of one of the child narrators, who studied at British universities, was a technocrat in Gaza’s Hamas-run government.
A BBC spokesperson told Middle East Eye a review into How to Survive a Warzone was still ongoing. The film about Palestinian doctors in Gaza has cleared all internal “editorial policy” teams, sources at the BBC said. The same sources, who work across multiple BBC departments, said that director-general Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, the BBC’s CEO, are unwilling to release the film, despite Turness telling editorial meetings that she wants the corporation to be “on the right side of history”.