BBC ordered staff to align reporting with Hamas narrative, leaked memo shows
A leaked internal BBC memo ordered staff to adopt Hamas’ narrative when reporting on humanitarian aid to Gaza, The Spectator reported.
Hamas launched an aggressive disinformation campaign against the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an organization established by the Trump administration in May to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza. The GHF, which has so far distributed over 101 million meals to Gazans, has proven more effective than UN-led operations. Aid distributed by the UN, which maintains close ties with Hamas, often finds itself in the hands of the terror group instead of civilians. It was also recently discovered that the UN is withholding 950 trucks containing roughly 2,400 tons of food in Gaza while accusing Israel of starving Gazans.
Hamas, in coordination with the UN, has therefore launched a smear campaign against the GHF that involves publishing false reports, such as mass killings at aid sites carried out by the IDF in coordination with the GHF. American and European media, including the BBC, are quick to report these stories as fact without waiting for verification.
BBC editors distributed a memo titled “Covering the food crisis in Gaza,” outlining how staff should frame the “famine in Gaza” narrative. The memo declared that “the argument over how much aid has crossed into Gaza is irrelevant” and that reporters should say the current distribution system—in other words, the GHF— “doesn’t work.”
“The BBC – which declined to comment on the email – appears content to accept casualty figures and starvation claims from Hamas-linked bodies or sympathetic NGOs as definitive, while dismissing or omitting Israeli data and counterclaims,” wrote Jonathan Sacerdoti for The Spectator. “The email directs staff to reference ‘mounting evidence’ of starvation and deaths around aid centres, yet makes no mention of Hamas operatives looting convoys, obstructing access, or even firing on civilians attempting to collect food – allegations which have been made publicly by Israel and backed at times by video and eyewitness testimony.”
International media have yet to provide evidence of widespread hunger in Gaza. Some outlets, like the New York Times, have tried passing off photos of disabled children as starving kids, in lieu of photographic evidence. Trump officials, including US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, have categorically denied any famine in Gaza.
In its memo, the BBC also ordered staff to frame Israel as the “occupying power” in Gaza, despite the IDF’s complete disengagement from the territory in 2005. Israel had no military presence in Gaza before the October 7, 2023 Hamas invasion and massacre. Hamas remains the official ruling power in the Gaza Strip.
BBC’s collusion with Hamas
The memo comes as no surprise to those familiar with the BBC’s historic anti-Israel narrative. The outlet has been so dedicated to Hamas’ messaging, in fact, that former BBC Television Director Danny Cohen recently called the BBC’s Arabic channel “the media wing of Hamas.”
The outlet has also closely collaborated with Hamas. The BBC’s film “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” paints Hamas and its supporters as victims of Israel, which is portrayed as a genocidal aggressor. It is narrated by a 13-year-old boy who has since been revealed to be the son of senior Hamas member Ayman Alyazouri.
The BBC has consistently avoided calling members of Islamic terror groups “terrorists,” instead referring to them as “freedom fighters,” “gunmen,” or “militants” and takes considerable care to favorably depict terror groups that target Israelis. In December, for example, the BBC published a story titled: “Five Gaza journalists killed in Israeli strike targeting armed group.” The “armed group” was Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an organization that has carried out dozens of attacks on Israelis—including several suicide bombings—and is designated a terror organization in the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, and the EU. The “five Gaza journalists” were really PIJ terrorists, a fact the BBC only acknowledged later in the article.
The BBC also uses sleights of hand to depict Gazans—who overwhelmingly support Hamas and even participate in attacks—in a favorable light. When including quotes from Gazans, for example, the network deliberately mistranslates the Arabic word al-yahud, which means “the Jews”, to “the Israelis” in an effort to gloss over Islamic antisemitism.
An epidemic among legacy media
The BBC is among many legacy media corporations that have unquestioningly adopted Hamas’ narrative, a recent analysis found.
The report, published by the Network Contagion and Research Institute (NCRI), noted how Western media consistently cite the “Gaza Ministry of Health” as their primary source. But the fact that the ministry is a Hamas entity doesn’t seem to spark concerns about political neutrality, nor do news outlets find it problematic that it has a track record of pushing disinformation.
“The Ministry has a proven and systematic history of lies, deceptions, duplicated data, and exaggerations which strain credulity of any nonpartisan observer,” said the NCRI.
Not only do news publications frequently use Hamas’ “ministry” as its main source, but most of the time they don’t disclose this in the headline—presenting the story as fact.
“Of the high-engagement news articles NCRI analyzed, Hamas-linked officials and organizations, such as the Gaza Health Ministry, were directly cited in headlines more than any other named source,” the report explained. “In nearly three-quarters of those cases, it was not disclosed in the headline that the source was a Hamas affiliate. Every blame-casting headline targeted Israel or the GHF – while not a single one held Hamas responsible.”
The NCRI described the intense smear campaign against the GHF.
“Within days of GHF’s first meal deliveries, it became the target of a deliberate narrative assault, driven less by verifiable facts than by the demands of a competing narrative,” the report states. “Reports and evidence of violence at aid sites began to surface, and international and U.S. media outlets, social media influencers, and NGOs started publishing articles that ascribed blame to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) or GHF for intentional violence against civilians, war crimes, and complicity in the crime of genocide. The reports quickly condensed into viral headlines, but the claim that the IDF was systematically murdering civilians was usually sourced from Hamas-run ministries or anonymous accounts, and often unverified. Moreover, evidence that Hamas could be responsible for violence around aid sites – evidence provided by non-Hamas Palestinian sources, by Hamas’s online communications, and by video that in some cases shows Hamas operatives deliberately firing on Palestinian civilians– was almost never suggested.”
These headlines have fueled conspiracy theories against the GHF on social media, such as its participation in drug trafficking operations. They also drum up support for Hamas while undermining the United States. Using an AI language learning model (LLM), the NCRI randomly selected five high-engagement news articles related to the GHF and found that they created a 70% drop in blame for Hamas violence near aid sites, a 38% drop in support for US aid efforts, and a 10% drop in trust in American sources of information related to humanitarian aid.
