The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza
A leaked internal email from a BBC executive editor reveals that the Corporation has issued prescriptive instructions to staff on how to cover the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The memo, titled ‘Covering the food crisis in Gaza’, amounts to a top-down editorial diktat that discards impartiality, elevates one side of a deeply contested narrative, and imposes a specific anti-Israel legal-political framing as settled fact. The existence of this email is a telling sign of how the Corporation works to ensure its journalists stick to its own ideological angles.
The email, which was sent to BBC staff on Friday, begins by declaring that ‘the argument over how much aid has crossed into Gaza is irrelevant’ and instructs staff that ‘we should say’ the current distribution system ‘doesn’t work’. It explicitly favours a particular explanation of suffering in Gaza: one that blames the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a relatively new aid body established with US and Israeli cooperation, while glossing over the role of Hamas, the rulers of Gaza and a proscribed terrorist organisation under British law.
But the quantity of aid entering Gaza is not irrelevant. If Hamas is hijacking, obstructing, or reselling aid, as Israeli and independent reports suggest, and as documented footage and testimony have supported, then the location, handling, and efficacy of aid delivery become vital indicators of where the problem lies. Blaming Israel alone for the humanitarian breakdown while exonerating or ignoring Hamas is not responsible or fair journalism, especially as Israel argues it is going to extreme lengths to try to mitigate the jihadi terrorists’ efforts to persecute and deprive Gazan citizens.
