BBC’s Outrageous Anti-Israel Agenda
5 min read
4 min read
11 min read
A shocking new report documents years of BBC misinformation, spreading Hamas propaganda and lies around the world.
An explosive new report reveals that much of the BBC’s reportage is deeply flawed, containing manipulated material, quotes from terrorists and terrorist sympathizers masquerading as unbiased observers, and outright lies. The BBC’s worst distortions concern Israel.
“Claims against Israel seem to be raced to air or online without adequate checks, evidencing either carelessness or a desire always to believe the worst about Israel,” wrote John Prescott, who until June 2025 served as an advisor to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. Mr. Prescott was so appalled by what he saw that this month he wrote a 19-page damning critique of the BBC and sent it to all the Corporation’s Board Members.
“The errors come thick and fast,” Mr. Prescott noted, “sometimes with ‘eyewitness’ territory from locals (in Gaza) who have Tweeted in praise of the October 7 killings (of Israelis by Hamas terrorists) or worse.” The BBC has “systemic issues with the coverage” of Israel and its war against Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxies like Hezbollah.
The BBC persists in parroting Hamas’ statistics and narratives - even when the BBC’s own internal reports find that Hamas’ information is wrong.
For years, analysts have warned that when it comes to Jews and Israel, the BBC’s famed impartiality flies out the window. One report found that the BBC breached its own standards of impartiality 1,500 times in the four months following Hamas’ brutal October 7, 2023 attack, downplaying Hamas actions and citing Hamas sympathizers as impartial observers. Mr. Prescott’s new report documents a troubling list of the BBC’s failings in over two years since Hamas’ brutal attack.
Mr. Prescott found the BBC persists in parroting Hamas’ statistics and narratives - even when the BBC’s own internal reports find that Hamas’ information is wrong.
Take the commonly cited figure that 70% of those killed in fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza are women and children, not Hamas fighters, which the BBC continues to report to this day. This percentage comes directly from Hamas - often called “Gaza health officials” by news organizations - and has been found to be wildly inflated. In a little-reported act in mid-2024, the UN stopped accepting Hamas’ 70% figure and quietly began assuming that half of those killed in fighting were Hamas soldiers in its internal reports. In July 2024, the BBC commissioned its own report which found that Hamas inflated its civilian death count - but continued reporting Hamas’ now-debunked claim as fact.
Another example is the supposed mass executions of Gaza civilians by Israelis that the BBC - citing Hamas - claimed took place in April 2024. Mr. Prescott observes that the BBC had previously reported Hamas fighters digging mass graves at two hospitals in Gaza, Nasser and Al Shifa. Despite the fact that the BBC clearly knew that Hamas was responsible for the gravesites, when Israeli forces withdrew from both hospitals in April 2024, the BBC had no qualms in parroting Hamas claims that Israelis, not Hamas, had created the graveyards.
BBC coverage carried the “strong implication…that Israeli forces had buried thousands of bodies at both sites prior to withdrawing from the area.” When internal critics pointed out that these graveyards were established by Hamas - and that the BBC had in fact reported this fact - the BBC doubled down on its reporting, creating the false impression that Israeli troops had massacred civilians then covered up their crimes.
The BBC ran with the story, turning itself into a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda.
The BBC even embellished their grizzly story, repeating Hamas claims that the bodies in the graves showed clear signs of torture and execution and that they were buried with their hands tied behinds their backs. An internal BBC review noted there was “no independent corroboration” of Hamas’ lies, yet the BBC ran with the story, turning itself into a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda.
Stephen Colbert coined the tongue-in-cheek term “truthiness” to mean something that isn’t true, but which appeals to us and seems like it might well be true. Colbert meant it as satire but at the BBC, “truthiness” seems to stand in for truth, particularly where Israel is concerned. Take the case of Israel’s 12-week blockade of aid into Gaza from March to May 2025.
In May 2025, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher misspoke in a speech. Instead of citing the UN’s own report that 14,000 children were at risk for malnutrition within the course of a year unless more humanitarian aid entered Gaza, he falsely claimed that because of Israeli restrictions on aid entering Gaza, 14,000 babies were about to starve to death within the next 48 hours. The BBC - and other news outlets around the world - seized on this, reporting that thousands of infants were about to perish within hours. This coverage enraged viewers around the world at an already tense time.
Independent observers immediately noted that Fletcher misspoke, and the BBC did change its online coverage to note the UN’s more long-term projections. Yet that night, the BBC’s flagship program Newsnight repeated Fletcher’s incorrect figure, asking Israel’s UN Ambassador why Israel was sentencing 14,000 babies to death - and cementing the impression that Israeli actions in Gaza were causing the imminent deaths of thousands of innocents.
The show went on to feature a video of a pitiful newborn baby, Siwa Ashour, crying in a hospital. BBC’s Newsnight explained that she needed special formula because she was born with allergies and birth defects, and she was being denied formula because of Israel’s aid restrictions. In fact, the BBC was aware at the time the show aired that Siwa had received her special formula the previous week and had been released from the hospital. Yet none of these facts were ever mentioned in the program.
BBC Arabic is a 24 hour a day news service - partly funded by the UK Government with the express purpose of promoting British values overseas - that reports in Arabic from studios in Cairo and London. BBC Arabic content is available on television, radio, social media, and the internet, and reaches tens of millions of news consumers each day. It also is even more hostile to Israel than the BBC’s other services, and has a disturbingly high tolerance for anti-Jewish hate.
Some of its most popular talking heads openly post antisemitic comments on social media. Here are just three examples.
When critics pointed out these troubling social media posts to BBC executives, they doubled down on their support for the men. (Following intense media pressure, these men have not been invited back to BBC Arabic for the time being.)
Prescott’s report also details troubling differences between the way stories are presented on BBC Arabic and in the BBC’s other forums. BBC Arabic is routinely more solicitous towards Hamas than other BBC reporting. That was certainly the case in October 2024, when the BBC reported on Israel’s rescue of Fawzia Sido, a Yazidi woman who was trafficked to Gaza.
Ms. Sido’s story should have been front page news. When she was just eleven years old, ISIS fighters kidnapped Ms. Sido from her home in northern Iraq and held her in sexual servitude. She was trafficked to Gaza, where she was “owned” by a Hamas fighter who kept her as a slave for ten long years. After Israeli troops killed the Hamas member, they rescued Ms. Sido, who finally returned to Iraq to live with her family.
The BBC’s English headline denied any Israeli role in her rescue: “Yazidi woman rescued from Gaza after decade in captivity.” BBC Arabic’s headline was even worse, and actively tried to exonerate Hamas from any role in her captivity: “Israel says ‘Yazidi prisoner returned to Iraq after 10 years in Gaza,’ Hamas tells BBC ‘Israel narrative is fabricated’.” The BBC Arabic version of the story then includes a nearly 600-word statement from Hamas - longer than the story itself - calling Ms. Sido a liar.
While BBC’s main website carried 19 stories about Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, BBC Arabic contained none of these pieces. The BBC published four articles that were critical of Hamas - itself a shocking fact, given the hundreds of BBC articles that are highly critical of Israel - yet BBC Arabic contains translations of none of them. When a Hamas terrorist murdered seven Israeli civilians in the city of Jaffa in October 2024, BBC Arabic described the attack as a military operation and failed to report that the victims were civilians.
BBC Arabic also shielded Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy army in Lebanon, from criticism. When a Hezbollah rocket slammed into an Israeli park in the town of Majdal Shams in July 2024, it killed 12 Israeli Druze children who’d been playing football there. Mr. Prescott’s report details “critically different treatment” of the attack in BBC and BBC Arabic outlets. BBC outlets included Hezbollah’s denial of responsibility but noted that the terror group had bombed other nearby areas. BBC Arabic omitted any mention of Hezbollah's other attacks, and gave more airspace to Hezbollah’s denials of responsibility. The following day, BBC Arabic aired stories that claimed Israel had fabricated the attack.
“It is hard to conclude anything other than that the BBC Arabic’s story treatment was designed to minimize Israeli suffering and paint Israel as the aggressor," Mr. Prescott’s report notes.
The BBC’s troubling biases haven't always gone unnoticed. When a senior editor conducted an internal review of BBC Arabic in July 2024 and reported that he didn’t find any “red flags”, members of the BBC’s own Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee were shocked and ordered their own report. Senior BBC editorial advisor David Grossman conducted it and delivered his conclusions in January 2025, documenting case after case of shocking bias. One committee member who read it called it the most “extraordinary paper” she’d seen.
Yet nothing was done.
“It should have prompted urgent action by the (BBC) Executive but it did not.” Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s senior controller of news content, savaged the report, calling BBC Arabic an example of “exceptional journalism.” Bizarrely, he boasted that BBC Arabic is “almost as trusted as Al Jazeera,” the deeply troubled news outlet owned by the Government of Qatar, where Hamas’ senior leadership is based.
Mr. Prescott asks, “Is Al Jazeera the new gold standard the BBC wants to aspire to? All this is to entirely miss the main reason for having a taxpayer funded (BBC) World Service - to provide impartial news coverage and to reflect British values on the world stage.” Instead, the BBC that emerges from Mr. Prescott’s terrifying report is a deeply flawed, ideological and partisan organization that is more concerned with protecting itself from allegations of bias than in reporting the truth.
Danny Cohen, a former Director of BBC Television, speaks for many loyal BBC viewers and listeners: “As I read page after page of shocking revelations, I felt a growing sense of dismay towards those at the top of the BBC who have spent two years assuring me and others within the British Jewish community that they take issues of anti-Semitism and bias seriously. This report provides hard evidence that the BBC has been gaslighting us.”
For years, the BBC has traded on its august name and prestige to spread Hamas propaganda and lies around the world. It has deliberately downplayed Israeli suffering and concerns and fomented an atmosphere of poisonous anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment. We are all harmed by its lies.
The author of the report was Michael Prescott not John Prescott (who died in 2024).
This is crucially important albeit unsurprising information for the relatively small percentage of the public who are still objective and discerning despite all the deliberate misinformation (read: outright antisemitic lying) that has poisoned the very air we breathe.
For despicable people—like the Brits—who have an overall solid history of baseless and illogical Jew hatred, the truth unfortunately doesn't matter.
Nevertheless, it fosters hope in humanity that here and there people like Prescott are willing to speak out against grave injustice even if that goes against ignorant and ignoble popular belief.
Though the omniscient Judge may bide His time, we take heart that dastardly ingrates and liars eventually receive their just deserts!