Mick Hartley

Danny Cohen, a former BBC Television director, on the BBC's Gaza coverage:

The BBC’s royal charter sets out five “public purposes”, the very first of which is a commitment to impartiality. Yet the Israel-Hamas war has seen the BBC fail to deliver on this crucial test on more occasions than can be explained away as “errors” or bad luck.

A source of repeated issues over impartiality is BBC Arabic. Since the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, BBC Arabic has been forced to make 80 corrections to its reporting. Something is going badly wrong. Mistakes don’t happen 80 times.

The failures of impartiality have included BBC reporters describing Hamas terrorists as “the resistance”, as well as labelling attacks which targeted and killed civilians as “resistance operations”. It’s the language you would hear from a Hamas spokesman.

The corporation was forced to remove an episode of the BBC Arabic programme Trending, which questioned whether the Kfar Aza kibbutz massacre on October 7 actually happened. This plays into an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that seeks to undermine the terrible truth of what happened that day. How was a video of that nature produced and distributed by the BBC in the first place? How is it possible that editorial standards at BBC Arabic had fallen so low that this was seen as legitimate reporting?

There is plenty more. Last month a BBC Arabic presenter asked an Egyptian guest to apologise for expressing sympathy for Israel. One BBC Arabic journalist interviewed a Palestinian woman about her life amid the conflict but decided it was not relevant to ask her directly about the time she stabbed an Israeli neighbour in front of her children.

There is no sign that this blatant lack of impartiality at BBC Arabic will be dealt with any time soon by senior management. Yet this is not even the worst of it. The BBC continues to employ people who actually celebrated the October 7 terrorist attacks….

When breaches of impartiality are so egregious that they extend to the exaltation of a massacre, something has gone very wrong with the public broadcaster. But these scandals are made so much worse when the organisation fails to deal effectively with the problem.

Indeed, far from publicly recognising the scale of this issue, the BBC has gone out of its way to support and endorse its Arabic service. Director-general Tim Davie has recently stated his admiration for BBC Arabic, saying that the service was something “we should be very proud of”.

On taking the role of director-general, Davie chose to put impartiality at the heart of his tenure, describing it as his “number one priority”. Given the actions of BBC Arabic over the past seven months, it now seems clear that, unfortunately, he has failed in his mission in the most shameful way possible.

And this morning's lead story on BBC News – Gazans ‘shackled and blindfolded’ at Israel hospital, from Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson. 

Of relevance here, a story I posted on back in December from this same Lucy Williamson, of the eighteen-year-old Mohammed Nazzal, who claimed he'd been badly beaten, with bones in both hands broken by brutal warders in an Israeli jail where he'd been held without charge. Williamson interviewed the lad in Gaza, heavily bandaged hands on his lap, surrounded by his family, and believed every word. The fact that the Israel Prison Service released a video clearly showing an uninjured Nazzal, unbandaged hands by his side, happily climbing into a Red Cross bus on his release, made no difference to Williamson's breathless report. Everything that the Palestinians/Hamas say must be true, while the duplicitous Jews are always lying.

So no, I don't know about this latest story, but given Lucy Williamson's record I'm not exactly convinced…