Image: Rizwana Hamid, director of the Centre for Media Monitoring presenting findings to a packed Committee Room 12 at the House of Commons.
There were tense exchanges at the launch of BBC on Gaza-Israel: One Story, Double Standards, 2023-2024 in Parliament on 17 June 2025, in which several panelists and attendees conveyed their loss of confidence in the BBC in reporting the real scale of atrocities perpetrated by Israel in Gaza. Ambassador Husam S. Zomlot of the Palestine Mission to the UK, noted that the report’s findings on the severity of the bias and lack of neutrality was “shocking”. He urged for the focus to remain on the genocide of Palestinians, warning against being distracted by Israel’s attempt to shift attention to the alleged Iranian nuclear threat.
The launch included a presentation by CfMM’s Rizwana Hamid and an explanation of the report methodology by Miqdaad Versi. Panellists were Karishma Patel (former BBC Newsreader & Middle East journalist, who resigned over the Corporation’s biased Gaza coverage and its culture of silence), Peter Oborne (veteran journalist and author of Why the West is Wrong About Islam – The Fate of Abraham), Andy McDonald MP, Richard Burgess (BBC director of news content) and Chris Doyle (director, Council for British-Arab Understanding, CAABU). The launch was co-hosted by MPs Naz Shah and Andy McDonald.
For Karishma Patel, the Corporation had failed to interrogate Israel’s claims and in providing adequate context to news items. Andy McDonald MP also noted that Israel’s intention of “ethnically cleansing” a population of 2.2 million people had to be called out rather than obscured. In a powerful intervention, Peter Oborne asked why the BBC had “never once” called on Professor Avi Schlaim, the British-Israeli expert at the University of Oxford, to comment on the news.
Key findings from the report after an analysis of approximately 4, 000 articles and 32,000 broadcast segments between 7 October 2023 and 6 October 2024:
- despite Gaza enduring 34x more deaths than Israel since the start of the war, the BBC ran an almost equal number of articles profiling personal and humanising stories about specific Israeli or Palestinian victims.
- Terms like ‘barbaric’, ‘slaughter’, and massacre are used 3.6 times more for Israeli victims and terms like ‘butchered’ only for them.
- Palestinian minors are described as ‘teenage boys’ while Israeli minors are called ‘children’.
- Fewer Palestinians (1,085) than Israeli’s (2,350) interviewed and Palestinians pressed to condemn Hamas 38 times while Israeli officials are not asked to condemn their government’s actions.
- Despite Gaza enduring mass civilian casualties for many months, sympathetic articles with emotive, humanising or personal stories of Palestinians appeared only twice as often as those for Israelis.
- BBC article headlines mentioned Palestinian casualties just two times more than Israeli casualties, despite 34x more Gazan deaths.
- The BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage across articles, and 19 times more across TV/radio, when measured on a per-fatality basis in proportion on the 34:1 Gazan-Israeli death toll.
- the BBC attached the ‘Hamas-run’ qualifier to Palestinian casualty figures in 1,155 articles – almost as many times as the Palestinian death toll was mentioned across BBC articles – thus undermining Gazan casualties and Palestinian suffering, more generally.
Rizwana Hamid called on BBC’s Richard Burgess to draw his executive’s attention to the report findings and respond to how the Corporation will ensure fair and proportional representation in the future.
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