One More Time: The BBC and Its Israel Problem

The BBC keeps making errors, big and little, in its coverage of the war in Gaza launched by Hamas against the Jewish state. And those errors all seem to favor Hamas. A small but telling example — one misleading word — can be found here: “BBC issues apology after calling October 7 an ‘escalation’ of Israel-Hamas war,” Jerusalem Post, October 9, 2025:

The BBC has apologized for a staff email that referred to the massacre of October 7 as an ‘escalation’, according to a report by The Telegraph on Tuesday.

The email was sent to BBC staff in recognition of the second anniversary of the terror attacks. It was addressed after staff members who received it raised concerns about the phrasing.

The email was part of a regular series of updates sent by the BBC Audiences, which is responsible for audience research and advising staff on viewer feedback.

The email read, “As we reach the two-year anniversary of the escalations in the Israel-Gaza conflict, we asked UK audiences what they want and need from news coverage moving forward.” The report went on to say that the email, in place of a picture of Israeli victims of the Hamas attack, included an image of Palestinian women and children standing amongst the rubble of fallen Gaza buildings.

By calling the Hamas atrocities carried out on October 7, 2023 an “escalation,” the BBC implied that this was part of a pre-existing series of tit-for-tat attacks with Israel, and that on October 7 Hamas was merely upping the ante, “escalating” an ongoing exchange of blows. But there had been no series of previous blows by the IDF against Hamas. The Hamas attack came out of the blue: a surprise blow at the Jewish state, which had recently increased the number of Gazans allowed into Israel to work, a sign of trust that there was now sufficient calm in Gaza. The attack on October 7 was no more an “escalation” than was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Telegraph reported that a senior BBC news presenter stated it was a junior member of staff who wrote the email. He said, “I don’t think the people who wrote that are evil; I think they just don’t understand anything about the modern world.”

That’s quite an admission by a senior BBC presenter about a junior member of the staff. Should someone who “doesn’t understand anything about the modern world” be employed by the BBC to write up the news? Or, at least, shouldn’t every word he writes be subject to review before being sent out?

“To use a picture of Palestinian suffering when you are marking the second anniversary of the October 7 attacks: how does that get signed off? It just epitomises everything the BBC is having to grapple with internally,” he concluded….

Why did the BBC not show, on the second anniversary of the October 7 attacks, pictures of Israelis who had been murdered that day, or pictures of those now being held by Hamas as hostages? The BBC’s callousness in choosing to ignore the Israeli victims, and instead showing a picture of “Palestinian suffering” on the anniversary of the day Israelis were raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered, is intolerable.

A BBC source defended the choice of photo accompanying the email to The Telegraph, saying it was illustrated with a picture of Gaza because it covered current audience attitudes to the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Are “audience attitudes” what the BBC should be swayed by in its coverage of the Gaza War? After all, there is now an epidemic of antisemitism sweeping the globe. Should the BBC reflect that “attitude” by feeding into the antisemitic narrative? Or should it ignore those “audience attitudes” in favor of something else — the truth?