BBC forced to correct two Gaza stories a week

[Twiglets1]

The BBC has been forced to correct two stories a week about the Gaza conflict since the Oct 7 attacks on Israel, The Telegraph has revealed.

BBC Arabic has had to make 215 corrections and clarifications over the past two years on stories that were found to be biased, inaccurate or misleading.

The figures follow a week of revelations by The Telegraph of one-sided reporting at the BBC, disclosed in an 8,000-word dossier compiled by a whistleblower, which also accused BBC Arabic of choosing to “minimise Israeli suffering” in the war in Gaza to “paint Israel as the aggressor”.

On Monday, the BBC is also expected to apologise for the misleading editing of a Donald Trump speech in a Panorama documentary, putting further pressure on Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, to quit.

The media bias campaign group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera) obtained the corrections after over 100 of its complaints over BBC Arabic’s coverage were upheld.

One of its complaints involved a BBC Arabic report in January this year about the treatment of hostages by the Al-Qassam Brigade, in which the Hamas unit was described as “guarding” the hostages and being “responsible for securing the hostages”, rather than holding them captive.

BBC Arabic – which is part of the World Service and is funded mainly through the licence fee – has also been forced to make more than 40 corrections after Camera complained about stories that incorrectly referred to communities inside Israel’s internationally recognised territory as “settlements” and their residents as “settlers”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/09/bbc-forced-to-correct-two-gaza-stories-a-week/

Their editing of Trump's speech was probably the story that caused the BBC the most damage. But their bias over trans issues and Gaza are relevant too.

Their* *broadcast of Bob Vylan's set at Glastonbury also broke editorial guidelines in relation to harm and offence, so that was more reputational damage.

Winston Smith's job in 1984 was to edit an online newspaper to make the stories of the past fit the reality of the present.

Orwell based the Ministry of Truth upon his time at the BBC. It's incredible how accurate he was in his distopian depiction of the organisation.

That seems wrong too unless the Palestinians were members of Hamas, in which case they were members of a terrorist organisation in the opinion of the UK government.

Did he really? He must have seen the writing on the wall even then.

BBC has failed to recognise its own bias, says Cleverly

Sir James Cleverly has criticised the BBC for failing to recognise its own bias.
The shadow Tory minister and former home secretary said: “The BBC’s problem was a failure to recognise its own bias. I raised [this issue] with senior BBC management on numerous occasions.

“Credulous reporting of Hamas propaganda as fact, selective editing of President Trump, not pulling the Bob Vylan feed, the rebuke of Martine Croxall, etc etc

“They saw each ‘mistake’ as being in isolation and couldn’t or wouldn’t see a wider pattern.

“I hope that this episode will trigger a broader look at bias, groupthink, and political fashion within the BBC by the BBC.

“I want the BBC to succeed, it’s a powerful British brand, but it needs a proper kick up the arse for that to happen. Perhaps this is it."

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/09/tim-davie-resigns-bbc-reaction/#1762714584302

White House reacts with two word response

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has posted two words on X in response to Tim Davie and Deborah Turness resigning.

She posts two screenshots of news articles side by side: above the first she writes "shot" over a Telegraph article with the headline: "Trump goes to war with 'fake news' BBC".

"Chaser" she writes above the second - a BBC News article announcing Tim Davie's resignation.

Earlier this week, Leavitt called the BBC "100% fake news" in response to a Panorama documentary which was criticised as misleading viewers over the way a speech by US President Donald Trump was edited.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cd9kqz1yyxkt

The Telegraph has published the internal dossier that has plunged the BBC into crisis.

It was written by former journalist Michael Prescott and sent to the BBC board, exposes a string of incidents that demonstrate serious apparent bias in the corporation’s reporting.

Mr Prescott, who until June 2025 was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board (EGSB), highlights serious problems with BBC Arabic’s reporting on Gaza, in which it apparently gives extensive space to the views of Hamas.

Re the Israel-Hamas war, the dossier focuses on story selection, story treatment, Gaza "journalists," death toll in Gaza, mass graves, Newsnight, a tale of two letters and the question of whether the ICJ said there was a “plausible risk of genocide” as the BBC reported.

Story selection

David Grossman was commissioned to review five months of coverage, from May 7th, 2024, to October 6th, 2024. That amounted to 535 articles on the English language website and 523 on BBC Arabic.

On January 16th, 2025, the EGSC received his report, which exposed stark differences in the way important stories had been handled by BBC Arabic and the BBC’s main news website.

For example:

• On story selection, the BBC’s main news website posted 19 separate stories about the hostages taken by Hamas on the day of its terror attack. On BBC Arabic there were none
• By contrast, every critical article about Israel that appeared on BBC News English website was replicated by BBC Arabic
• The English language website had three times as many stories that primarily dealt with the suffering of Israelis. These included the horrors faced by hostages held captive in Gaza, how traumatised Israeli communities were coping, Hamas and Hezbollah rocket attacks on residential Israeli communities and growing antisemitism. These were all missing from BBC Arabic
• There were no articles critical of Hamas on the BBC Arabic site and four on the English site.

Story treatment - Fawzia Sido liberation
BBC News’ English website covered the story of a Yazidi woman, Fawzia Sido, rescued by Israeli soldiers after a decade as a sex slave in Iraq, prior to her arrival in Gaza.
Kidnapped, drugged, raped and “sold off” for marriage to an ISIS fighter at the age of just 11, the story detailed her escape and rescue, with back up for her claims from the US State Department and the Iraqi authorities.
BBC Arabic ran the same story but with critical differences - starting with the headline: “Israel says ‘Yazidi prisoner returned to Iraq after ten years in Gaza,’ Hamas tells BBC ‘Israel narrative is fabricated’”.
The bulk of BBC Arabic’s story is taken up by a 582-word-long statement by Hamas disputing the woman’s terrible story.
Story treatment – Hamas attack on Jaffar
Similarly, there were major content and tone differences in stories covering an attack by Hamas terrorists on October 1st, 2024, which killed seven Israeli civilians in Jaffa.
The BBC News’ English website revealed how the victims included Inbar Segev Vigder, a young mother who died shielding her 9-month-old baby from harm.
BBC Arabic covered the story under the headline: “The Qassam Brigades claims responsibility for the Jaffa operation, what do we know about it?” The report presented the attack as a military operation and gave no information about the victims.
Similarly, the deaths of four hostages in Gaza on June 3, 2024, were covered with a dedicated article on the English language site but dismissed in four paragraphs in a BBC Arabic article that focused on Hezbollah attacks on Israel.

Gaza ‘journalists’
Media stories about the antisemitic and pro-Hamas views of journalists appearing on BBC Arabic forced another internal review into the channel in June, 2025.
In April, 2025, The Telegraph reported that BBC Arabic had given a regular platform to the journalist Samer Elzaenen, who had posted a string of antisemitic comments – including suggesting Jews should be burned “as Hitler did”.
At the time it was reported he had appeared “a dozen times” on BBC Arabic reporting from Gaza. However internal research showed Elzaenen, who was consistently introduced as a journalist on BBC Arabic, actually appeared 244 times between 13th November 2023 and 18th April, 2025.
BBC Arabic regular, Ahmed Qannan, who described a gunman who killed four civilians and an Israeli police officer as a “hero” , appeared 217 times on the channel between 8th February, 2024 and the 27th April, 2025. Introduced as a journalist from Gaza, he appeared both on BBC Arabic radio and Gaza Today.
Ahmed Alagha, who described Israelis as less than human and Jews as “devils” appeared 522 times between 21st November, 2023, and 26th April, 2025, across BBC Arabic television, radio and BBC Gaza Today. He was consistently introduced as a journalist.
Revelations about the views of these journalists prompted calls by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch for wholesale reform of BBC Arabic.
In its public statement, the BBC downplayed their contributions to the channel, even going so far as to claim they were just “eyewitnesses”.
On 26th April, 2025, the BBC in a statement said: “We hear from a range of eyewitness accounts from the strip”.
In a separate statement the BBC also said: “These are not BBC members of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team”.
Most viewers would consider hundreds of appearances on the BBC, reporting on developments, to amount to a journalist being almost a part of the Corporation’s reporting team.

Death toll in Gaza
A separate review into BBC coverage of the conflict’s death toll was commissioned and reported back to the EGSC on 2nd July, 2024.
The review was commissioned after the UN revised its figures and admitted the percentage of women and children being killed in the conflict was less than previously thought.
In the 2014 conflict, the Hamas-run health ministry reported casualty figures based on deaths recorded in hospitals. This matters because the majority of hospital-recorded deaths are men.
However, in this war, Hamas has based its figures both on hospital records and on “media reports” from the Gaza Government Media Office. Hamas, which runs the GMO, has never explained how this number has been calculated but the majority of deaths from “media reports” are women and children.
Despite growing concerns that this new methodology was unreliable, the UN and media outlets, including the BBC, reported that 70 per cent of all those killed in Gaza were women and children. Eventually the UN reviewed and revised down the figure to 52 per cent.
In the report to the EGSC, we were warned that for too long the BBC had given “unjustifiable weight” to the 70 per cent claim, even though concerns about its credibility were well known.

Mass graves
In April, 2024, and again in June, the BBC covered two stories relating to the discovery of mass graves in Gaza. The first was discovered at Al Nasser hospital and the second at Al Shifa.
The strong implication in the coverage was that Israeli forces had buried hundreds of bodies at both sites prior to withdrawing from the area. The source for both stories was the Hamas controlled Gaza Civil Defence Agency. This was not reflected in the coverage.
The internal report to the EGSC flagged: “There was no independent corroboration of allegations of war crimes, including alleged evidence of summary executions, torture and bodies found with their hands tied together”.
One online story incorrectly implied a UN official had corroborated the reports of hands being tied.
It seems that the most likely explanation was the graves at both hospitals were dug by Palestinians and the people buried there had died or been killed prior to the arrival of Israel ground forces.
The EGSC was reminded that the BBC had itself reported extensively on Palestinians digging these graves at the time. These reports had topped its bulletins.
How could this then be forgotten in the subsequent BBC coverage that suggested something more sinister had occurred? The EGSC was offered no explanation.
The question becomes even more pressing when you learn the journalists responsible for the first set of stories were the same journalists who wrote the second set of stories suggesting the graves were evidence of Israeli war crimes.

Newsnight
In May of this year, Tom Fletcher, the UN’s Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, made a claim that an IPC report had warned 14,000 babies in Gaza were at risk of starving to death within the next 48 hours.
The claim, made during Israel’s aid blockade, sparked worldwide attention and concern.
Yet the UN quickly distanced itself, refusing to repeat the claim at a press conference.
Accordingly, the BBC updated its online articles to reflect the actual findings on the IPC report in question – that 14,000 children could starve in a year if the blockade was not lifted.
Despite this, Fletcher’s inaccurate claim was put to Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon on Newsnight. Why, when the BBC knew the suggestion was wrong?
The same programme also featured images of baby Siwar Ashour who suffered from allergies and required specialist formula. She also had a congenital oesophageal condition, which had been reported in The Guardian.
By the time of broadcast, the BBC already knew the story was out of date and that baby Siwar had received the necessary formula a week earlier, she was maintaining weight and had been discharged from hospital. None of that was revealed in the programme - meaning the BBC had broadcast another inaccurate story.
Twice in the same programme the Newsnight team broadcast stories that were inaccurate and it is not entirely clear why.
This was not the first or last time the BBC has reported stories about starvation in Gaza without telling audiences that the person highlighted has pre-existing medical conditions that might explain their emaciated appearance.
As recently as last month (August, 2025), the BBC had to correct a headline which stated: ‘Malnutritioned Gaza woman flown to Italy dies in hospital’. It was replaced with ‘Gaza woman flown to Italy dies in hospital’ after it became clear she had serious preexisting conditions. The correction was only made two days later after the questionable version had been shared around the world.

A tale of two letters
In an internal report presented to the EGSC on May 14th , 2024, the Committee was again warned of problems with the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s war with Hamas.
This included a BBC News article about Nasser Hospital that appeared under the headline: “Gaza medics tell BBC that Israeli troops beat and humiliated them after hospital raid”.
Under international law hospitals are exempt from military targeting – except in certain circumstances, which might include the use of a hospital as a military base. The BBC article did not make those circumstances clear and did not cover the evidence Israel had uncovered of Hamas operating there.
On another occasion ,a letter, signed by 600 lawyers, argued the UK Government was breaching international law in selling arms to Israel.
This letter received extensive coverage across BBC television and radio programmes as well as online.
A second letter, written by UK Lawyers for Israel and signed by more than 1,000 lawyers, argued the opposite was true. It was not covered at all online or on television and was referred to on just four bulletins on Radio 4.
An internal investigation by David Grossman into coverage also flagged the description of Hamas tunnels in one BBC report as being used to “move goods and people”.
David warned that while this was factually accurate it hardly told the whole story of what the tunnels were really for and laid the BBC open to the charge of “aiming to in some way to sanitise Hamas’s terror infrastructure”.

Did the ICJ say there was a “plausible risk of genocide” as the BBC reported?
The BBC’s coverage of the International Court of Justice’s interim order on January 26th, 2024, was also reviewed by David Grossman in his report to the EGSC.
Former ICJ President Joan Donoghue told BBC’s HardTalk programme the media had widely misinterpreted its findings. She said it was not correct to say the ICJ had ruled there was a “plausible case of genocide” in Gaza.
But a report to the EGSC flagged “numerous instances” of the phrase being used on BBC reports, analysis and live two-ways on both television and radio. It was also cited by International Editor Jeremy Bowen and on Newsnight.
The report said there were too many instances of the BBC misrepresenting the ICJ’s ruling to be listed in full.
The ICJ report runs to just 26 pages and was written in non-technical language. Had no BBC reporter troubled themselves to read it?
The internal review concluded: “It is very clear and explicitly states that the court is not making any determination on the merits of South Africa’s case. The ICJ said it was only assessing whether what South Africa had alleged was potentially covered by the genocide convention.”
Despite the HardTalk interview, it would take months for the BBC to make a clarification.

How many stories a week are they putting out? How many are inaccurate?

if they are filing 5 stories a week and 2 are inaccurate (why is a separate issue) then it’s shocking, whereas 2 out of 100 is to be expected in a fast paced news environment.

second matter is why are they inaccurate? Is it the race to get it on air means they are not double sourcing? Is it misinformation being fed to journalists deliberately to undermine them? Are there state actors at play that are undermining the news gathering process?

until all facts are in hand nobody knows what’s going on

It's riddled with left-wing groupthink. It's as simple as that.

A previous BBC journalist said she'd always remember the corridors of the BBC being littered with champagne bottles on the morning of Tony Blair's victory in 1997. The journalist Barbara Plett said that she cried when Yassah Arafat left his compound for France.

They simply don't realise they're biased. They think their views are those held by all decent people. If you don't share their views, you're a bigot that can be dismissed as irrelevant.

An online newspaper? Written in 1949.

Though I agree Orwell was a brilliant observationist.

Just Googled it and Winston Smith's job is to rewrite historical records so ... the 1949 version of online news maybe seeing as reports change over time and are only "factual" in the loosest sense as being what someone wants the facts to be at a particular point in time.

True. My concern was the source ..book Vs film ( there are a few). Which is an interesting counterpoint to this discussion about where we get our facts/information from.
The subject of journalism losing impartiality and turning into activism was something associated press journalist Martin Friedman spoke about.
Controlling information has always been a political strategy right down to the algorithms that populated your online content.

Pp comments about loss of trust in institutions
, or more worryingly, the institutions of governance, should be ....a bit of a concern.

The early days of the BBC had an awareness of it's role in the morale of the nation, this 'activism' has the opposite effect, it inflames divisions. It's the strategy of useful idiots because the BBC has funded some very good programming and I would be sorry to lose that.

Another one who is not surprised how inaccurate and biased the BBC has become. They can't even call a terrorist a terrorist.

I have no faith in the BBC who should just report facts, not spin stories to fit their narrative, whether pro hamas or trans. Reality and truth appear to have left their organisation when discussing Palestinian/Israel isses along with biological reality, it just stirs up hatred.

Yes broadcasting clear cheering on of terrorists, showing they are infiltrated with useful idiots, who don't know where the 'stop broadcasting ' switch is when it suits them.

Not terribly encouraging reading @Twiglets1 - thanks as always for posting all this.

I haven't always lived in the UK and tbh ot sickens me to my stomach to hear anyone involved in US media criticizing UK media. The BBC and Fox News are so very world's apart that they can't be compared. The huge divisions in US society- actually the parallel world US voters live in- is in large part down to their unfit for purpose media.

I think its promising that this has been taken seriously and hope the BBC can address their issues. I think its unfair to expect that bias wont creep in from time to time- we are all biased. The important bit is having process to root it out and try to do better.

Long live the BBC 😈

The Labour Party were anti semitic lead by Corbyn. It's taken a long time to slowly attempt to realise they were.

The BBC need to go through a similar process, weed out anti semitism and clean it up.