the BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza. A greater number have been killed by Israel in its war on the tiny enclave than the total number of journalists killed in all other major conflicts of the past 160 years combined
Jonathan Cook / Jonathan Cook Blog
Veteran journalist Peter Oborne eviscerated the BBC this week over its shameful reporting of Gaza – and unusually, he managed to do so face-to-face with the BBC’s executive news editor, Richard Burgess, during a parliamentary meeting.
Oborne’s remarks relate to a new and damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. The report found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices.” These aren’t editorial slip-ups. They reveal a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour.
Oborne was one of several journalists to confront Burgess. His comments, filmed by someone at the meeting, can be watched below. Oborne makes a series of important points that illustrate why the BBC’s slanted, Israel-friendly news agenda amounts to genocide denial, and means executives like Burgess are directly complicit in Israeli war crimes:
1. The BBC has never mentioned the Hannibal directive, invoked by Israel on 7 October 2023, that green-lit the murder of Israeli soldiers and civilians, often by Apache helicopter fire, to prevent them being taken captive by Hamas. The Israeli media has extensively reported on the role of the Hannibal directive in the Israeli military’s response on 7 October, but that coverage has been completely ignored by the BBC and most UK media outlets.
Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive – essential context for understanding what happened on 7 October – explains much of the destruction that day in Israel usually attributed to Hamas “barbarism”, such as the graveyard of burnt-out, crumpled cars and the charred, crumbling remains of houses in communities near Gaza.
Hamas, with its light weapons, did not have the ability to inflict this kind of damage on Israel, and we know from Israeli witnesses, video footage and admissions from Israeli military officers that Israel was responsible for at least a share of the carnage that day. How much we will apparently never know because Israel is not willing to investigate itself, and media like the BBC are not doing any investigations themselves, or putting any pressure on Israel to do so.
2. The BBC has never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, the basis of its “mowing the lawn” approach to Gaza over the past two decades, in which the Israeli military has intermittently destroyed large swaths of the tiny enclave. The official aim has been to push the population, in the words of Israeli generals, back to the “Stone Age”. The assumption is that, forced into survival mode, Palestinians will not have the energy or will to resist their brutal and illegal subjugation by Israel and that it will be easier for Israel to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland.
Because Israel has been implementing this military doctrine – a form of collective punishment and therefore indisputably a war crime – for at least 20 years, it is critically important in any analysis of the events that led up to 7 October, or of the genocidal campaign of destruction Israel launched subsequently.
The BBC’s refusal even to acknowledge the doctrine’s existence leaves audiences gravely misinformed about Israel’s historical abuses of Gaza, and deprived of context to interpret the campaign of destruction by Israel over the past 20 months.
3. The BBC has utterly failed to report the many dozens of genocidal statements from Israeli officials since 7 October – again vital context for audiences to understand Israel’s goals in Gaza.
Perhaps most egregiously, the BBC has not reported Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblically-inspired comparison of the Palestinians to “Amalek” – a people the Jews were instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth. Netanyahu knew this clearly genocidal statement would have especial resonance with what now amounts to a majority of the combat soldiers in Gaza who belong to extreme religious communities that view the Bible as the literal truth.
The hardest thing to prove in genocide is intent. And yet the reason Israel’s violence in Gaza is so clearly genocidal is that every senior official from the prime minister down has repeatedly told us that genocide is their intent. The decision not to inform audiences of these public statements is not journalism. It is pro-Israel disinformation and genocide denial.
4. By contrast, as Oborne notes, on more than 100 occasions when guests have tried to refer to what is happening in Gaza as a genocide, BBC staff have immediately shut them down on air. As other investigations have shown, the BBC has strictly enforced a policy not only of banning the use of the term “genocide” by its own journalists in reference to Gaza but of depriving others – from Palestinians to western medical volunteers and international law experts – of the right to use the term as well. Again, this is pure genocide denial.
5. Oborne also points to the fact that the BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza. A greater number have been killed by Israel in its war on the tiny enclave than the total number of journalists killed in all other major conflicts of the past 160 years combined….
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