BBC documentary - children of Gaza

[SmokeRingsOfMyMind]

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/feb/17/gaza-how-to-survive-a-warzone-review-these-incredible-children-offer-a-sliver-of-hope

Did anyone see this last night? Heartbreaking and enraging in equal measure.

I am not sure why you keep arguing with me.

What I have said is that the most important issue here is the poor children of Gaza. You seem to agree with me.

The people who will dismiss this documentary are the people who would dismiss it anyway.

Those who are trying to make it into a big issue are those who are trying to discredit it for their own agenda. Calling it propaganda etc.

It's not actually a big issue, the boy is one person in the documentary and it now states at the beginning who his father is.

The most important thing here is the children of Gaza and that has been lost on this thread. Exactly what these posters want.

Ah yes, a fake documentary, my favourite type of documentary 😂

BBC news has become the propaganda tool of Hamas.

Hope you’re all sitting down and holding onto something for this:

• A co-producer of this “documentary” was a Palestinian activist - and one of the cameramen the BBC had hired in Gaza actually saluted Oct 7 on social media (he tweeted about the at the time of the massacre in glowing terms - tweet still available).
• A lot of the content was clearly staged, and the star of the show was a young Gazan boy called Abdullah -Abdullah is from one of Gaza's affluent families and narrates the hour long documentary.
• Now we need to go back to a Channel 4 news piece from November 2023: We are introduced to a young lad called Abdullah, the same Abdullah as the BBC used - BUT Channel 4 give his name as Abdullah Abu Shamalah - and introduce us to his father.
• Here is where it gets interesting: that is not the boy’s real name - and the man in the video is not his real father. Someone lied to Channel 4...In fact the name of the man playing the father in the Channel 4 video is Khalil Abu Shammala.
• He (Khalil Abu Shammala) is the Director of a PFLP linked anti-Israel propaganda NGO called Al Dameer and this full time activist was no doubt on site orchestrating whatever nonsense Channel 4 News was being fed (they believe any old crap)…it included pretending to be Abdullah's father.
• The two people are related though: a FB search reveals and throws up Shammala posting about his nephew: in a video from 2022 footage shows that the adults in his life had Abdullah in training to be a child propagandist for years…but it also gave me his real name: Abdullah Ayman Eliyazouri.
• And with that name it is possible to dig further - you find a post that connected the Shammala and Eliyazouri clans: It is likely that Abdullah's father is a man called Ayman Alyazouri.
• On Ayman’s timeline, sure enough, there plenty of references to (and pictures) his son Abdullah ('Aboud" as he is called, a diminutive).
• And then things start to be very clear: Because Abdullah's (the BBC narrator) father is an official in the Hamas government. He currently holds the position of Deputy Minister of Agriculture - but has held official positions in education and planning (I am shocked I tell you, shocked! 😂)
• There exists a lovely photo of the father of Abdullah (the person who the BBC let demonise Israel for 60 minutes) at an event in full Hamas gear (see the link below).
• There is also a nice post from Abdullah's father, praising Hamas terrorists who murdered four Israelis in June 2023 (again, it’s included in the link below)
• on 11 February 2021 - the father of our BBC narrator - posted a family mourning message for a founder of the Hamas terrorist group.

So the questions that naturally follow on from these revelations are; the two photographers followed these children around for months, they absolutely knew who he was. Did either of the producers?

How did the BBC let a son of a Hamas minister walk around looking for sympathy and demonising Israel for an hour in a BBC documentary?

BBC put on a Hamas Propaganda. And the useful idiots, as usual, lapped it up.

https://david-collier.com/bbc-pantomime/

None of that was happening in the documentary so it's not relevant.

a pp said:
They don't just think they are having a good time, they also seem to think every Palestinian child is a paid up card carrying member of hamas!

and my reply was to that - footage shows that many Palestinian children are being indoctrinated to support Hamas and hate Israelis and Jews.

As of 18 February 2025,

48,291 Palestinian (over half of identified victims being women, children or older people) and
1,706 Israeli
have been reported killed in the Gaza war.

@AnxiousRose
The topic of this thread is the documentary, The children of Gaza. It invites discussion about the documentary. It is not a thread about who is more to blame for the situation in Gaza.
The documentary was produced by a supposedly impartial, well regarded news source. We have since discovered that there were some fundamental flaws in the representation of the Palestinian children. One was not the child of civilians but the son of the terrorist Hamas organisation. The BBC has apologised for this misrepresentation. The documentary has made news round the world for the wrong reasons.
There are many threads on MN about the terrible situation in Gaza and rightly so. However, this thread focuses on this particular documentary. It is disappointing that the BBC, which takes great pride in its impartiality, did not carry out sufficient due diligence. It has damaged its reputation and diminished the reliability of the presentation of the documentary. The OP invited discussion about the documentary. That is why the focus in this particular thread is on the documentary and not on the terrible situation in Gaza.

YES, the OP invited discussion about the documentary, but the contents of the documentary have not been discussed here because the thread has been overtaken by people trying to discredit it and call it propaganda.

What was shown in the documentary is horrific and devastating. There are people who do not want this shown and will do whatever they can to dismiss it.

On this thread a minor aspect of the documentary has been blown out of proportion and taken precedence over what is most important, the horrors that children in Gaza are experiencing.

I do not feel that this documentary has been discredited at all, this has only highlighted how difficult it must have been for the documentary makers and emphasises the complexities which exist in the region.

From my POV, the thread was undermined by people claiming it didn't matter who the child in the documentary was and telling those who didn't like being lied to that they 'had no compassion' for the children of Gaza.

Nobody lied to you. The BBC said it had not been informed of the family connection in advance by the film's production and have since added a message to the start of the programme, making clear the family link, and saying the production team had "full editorial control.

And nobody said it "didn't matter" who a child in the documentary was.

And around we go...

I think people might have been less inclined to think you had no compassion had you, I don't know, expressed any.

My deep compassion for the children of Palestine, martyred by Hamas, is irrelevant to whether or not a documentary was trying to mislead its audience by lying to them.

I've said it before, it's a false dichotomy, "you say they lied, so you don't care", bollocks.

This isn't an expression of compassion or empathy. It's a rather inept attempt at disputing any moral responsibility on the part of the Israeli state, government or army.

What are you wittering about?

We're talking about whether a documentary misled people and it's clear that it did. Now it has a disclaimer. If it had had the disclaimer to begin with, we wouldn't be here disputing it.

Do keep up.

Expressed any sincerely

Is the only way to prove the sincerity of my compassion to say that it doesn't matter who the child in the documentary is related to, or whether we are lied to about it, then, no, I can't prove my sincerity. You got me.

No, that's not the only way to be sincere.

You (& the BBC) seem completely complacent about safeguarding. Before we get on to the question of working with Hamas its a basic safeguarding issue. Are you honestly telling us that its ok for the BBC to have spent 9 months making films with children and to have done NO due diligence as to who they were and who was looking after them? No child would be able to be in a film in the UK without regular contact and permission from the parents. Those children had to be picked up from somewhere every morning. Somebody knew. Either they deliberately didn't tell the BBC and actively covered up, or the BBC deliberately turned a blind eye or the BBC doesn't apply the same standards of safeguarding to Palestinian children as UK children or the BBC actively knew and are lying. None of these options are good.

The documentary is Hamas propaganda unwittingly sponsored by UK license fee payers, engineered by the BBC.

Yes the children should have been picked up from their homes every morning and given permission slips from their parents!
Shame Gaza is a war zone where the vast majority of children are homeless and thousands are orphans as their parents have been killed.

Yes it would have been ideal if the producers had known about the father of this boy and included it in the documentary but they didn't, now they do and they have included it.
Some people clearly do not want this shown and are attemping to disregard it as they do not want the world the see the extent of what the Israel govt are doing to the poor children in Gaza.

So the BBC can just abandon all safeguarding of vulnerable people in conflicts? Really? Wow.

And anyway, this child was not homeless or an orphan. He was the child of a government minister. A very priveleged child. You'd think film makers operating in such a desperate situation might notice. As I said before a more honest film made by people who actually cared about children in gaza might have explored that.

I did not say safeguarding should be abandoned.

You think this child is very privileged? Really? Wow.

In gaza, yes, the child of a Hamas minister is going to be priveleged compared to a child of an ordinary gazan living under Hamas terror.

So this child's life looked pretty shit, so what does that say for other children living in Gaza

The BBC relies on it's reputation for impartiality. It did not intend the programme to be deceitful but that the news story worldwide is about the failure of the BBC producers to check the background of the children. That is what is being reported.
The BBC is the fourth most trusted news source in the USA. This story will affect its ratings. Leadership at the BBC will not like this failure and they will be more reluctant to allow this type of reporting because, in the end, it is not reliable.
The BBC will be seen as having been manipulated by Hamas. Given today's news about Hamas and deception over the body of Shiri Bibas, the BBC reporting team will have to work hard to reestablish trust. They will be aware of the need to verify reports more thoroughly. I would be surprised if there hasn't been a shake up of the BBC reporting team over this.