The BBC should be ashamed of its Gaza coverage. The latest embarrassment is the revelation that 53 of the people killed in Gaza who the BBC described as ‘journalists’ were, in fact, Hamas terrorists. As the Telegraph reports, most of the obituaries appeared on BBC Arabic, while 10 featured on the BBC’s English coverage. Among them was Abdullah Darwish, an Al-Aqsa TV cameraman who was also a Hamas fighter who participated in the 7 October attacks.

The BBC’s defence makes matters worse. It claims its reports were ‘based on the information available to it at the time’. Yet the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) removed Darwish and Rizq Abu Shakian, another man featured by the BBC, from its database of journalists, after learning that they were combatants before the Telegraph broke its story. The corporation is now reviewing its coverage, but what were its editors doing when these men’s biographies required checking?

This is a consistent issue in the Gaza war, and one that the BBC should have been aware of. It is a well-known fact that Hamas and other terrorist groups deliberately confuse the roles of journalist and combatant. They do this in order to claim, in the event of a casualty, that Israel has ‘targeted’ a journalist. The BBC has managed to fall for this cynical ploy nearly every time.

By its dodgy reporting, the BBC implicitly bolsters one of the most pernicious myths about Israel: that it deliberately kills journalists to silence their reporting. But the fact that a fighter has a camera does not erase his military role, and nor does a journalist’s death alongside a military target establish that his journalism made him a target. By presenting men engaged in war as independent witnesses, the BBC has helped turn their deaths into evidence for an accusation that those deaths cannot, by themselves, sustain. Hamas could hardly ask for a more useful service than what the BBC provides for it.

The overlap extends beyond proven combat roles. A December 2025 study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre identified terrorist affiliations in 157 of 266 reported journalist and media-worker deaths, roughly 59 per cent. Its definition included employment by factional media, so not all 157 were fighters, but this should have given editors ample reason to investigate whose version of the Gaza war they were publishing.

Hamas has a vested interest in demonising the Jewish State, yet the BBC consistently treats the word of this proscribed terrorist organisation as the truth. The BBC owes viewers an explanation of how it checked its contributors and what relevant affiliations it failed to disclose. Any competent editor should examine their source’s independence, particularly in a conflict as polarising as this one. Instead, the BBC has allowed Hamas propaganda to be smuggled into Western homes with the stamp of a trusted broadcaster.

Since 7 October 2023, the BBC has happily shown footage of a devastated Gaza Strip – but there has been comparatively less interest in explaining the broader security threat that Hamas poses to Israel, or any of the measures taken by the Jewish State to minimise civilian casualties.

The BBC’s record on the Gaza war makes a mockery of its claims to accuracy and impartiality. The BBC documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, used a child narrator whose father was a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas-run administration. Ofcom found that omitting this fact materially misled audiences. The BBC later claimed that it wasn’t aware of the connection. But, as with the dead ‘journalists’, this isn’t good enough. The BBC broadcast an emotive and highly biased piece of propaganda without knowing the full picture.

Earlier failures were just as grotesque. After the October 2023 Al-Ahli hospital explosion, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, claimed an Israeli airstrike was responsible. In fact, it was a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The following month, the BBC was forced to apologise for falsely claiming that Israeli troops were ‘targeting’ medical teams at Al-Shifa Hospital.

The BBC’s repeated professions of editorial rigour are contemptible when set against that record. A broadcaster that lectures the public about misinformation has repeatedly failed the elementary checks its own authority depends on.

Senior editors must now account publicly for the sources they trusted and the reports that need correcting, across BBC Arabic and English-language output. Failures this serious should cost careers. Licence-fee payers deserve a broadcaster that is capable of questioning Hamas’s propaganda. The public should not have to investigate the BBC itself to discover what it left out.

Andrew Fox is a retired Parachute Regiment officer, a senior fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and co-host of The Brink podcast.