The BBC has been forced to correct two stories a week about the Gaza conflict since the Oct 7 attacks on Israel, The Telegraph can reveal.
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 more than 100 of its complaints over BBC Arabic’s coverage were upheld. They work out as an average of two stories a week.
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”.
Responding to the figures, Baroness Deech, a former BBC governor, said the broadcaster’s own Executive Complaint Unit (ECU) has failed in its obligation as an internal standards watchdog.
She said: “While BBC Arabic rightly continues to receive condemnation from politicians from all sides of the House for its repeated breaches of BBC guidelines and its flagrant anti-Israel bias, the BBC’s ECU considers it to be entirely blameless.
“The ECU is turning a blind eye to bias within BBC Arabic. We need an independent complaints process because the BBC simply cannot be trusted to mark its own homework.”
Michael Prescott, who until June was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC), was so appalled by the corporation’s lack of action over numerous instances of bias that he sent a memo to all BBC board members, which is now circulating in government departments.
In a copy of the letter, which was last week published by The Telegraph, he said that BBC Arabic gave a platform to journalists who had made extreme anti-Semitic comments.
Among the examples of bias highlighted by both Camera and Mr Prescott were the differences in stories about an attack by Hamas on Oct 1 2024 that killed seven Israeli civilians in Jaffa.
While the BBC News English version reported how the civilians were killed on a train and railway platform, the BBC Arabic version presented the attack as a military operation with no mention of the civilian victims.
Another BBC Arabic report in January this year described the Al-Qassam Brigade as “guarding” the hostages and as being “responsible for securing the hostages”, rather than holding them captive.
It also featured two female Israeli hostages “thanking” their captors for the “good treatment” they received while “in custody”.
Following a complaint from Camera that the video omitted the “horrific reality of the torture and execution of hostages”, BBC Arabic was forced to amend its story.
It removed the section that claimed the hostages had received good treatment and added a brief reference to Hamas abuse.
However the BBC, in its statement, defended the video for being “duly accurate” and containing “due context”.
Camera appealed to the ECU on the grounds that even the amended video did not state that members of this unit had killed hostages, such as Ofir Tzarfati. Instead, the broadcaster presented this fact as something “Israel said”, even though Hamas itself has claimed that Tzarfati was murdered by his “guards”.
However, the ECU concluded that specific mention of the murder of Tzarfati was not necessary in a short video.
Another complaint from Camera was that a BBC Arabic series about Hamas, its ideology and the motivation behind the Oct 7 attacks, made no mention of the terror group’s founding charter – which pledges to destroy Israel and create an Islamic state.
Camera complained that instead the programmes gave a platform to Hamas’s justification for the attacks.
The BBC dismissed the complaint on the grounds that the focus of the series was not the ideology of Hamas. The ECU upheld the finding, ruling that “in this context an understanding of the Hamas charter was not directly relevant”.
Hadar Sela, co-editor of Camera, said: “This report exposes the scale of misinformation spread by BBC Arabic in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and the rise in anti-Semitism across the West.
“Since the Hamas massacre on Oct 7, BBC Arabic has issued 215 corrections after we flagged stories that were inaccurate, misleading, or biased.
“Yet when our complaints are rejected and we appeal to the BBC’s internal watchdog, the Executive Complaints Unit, the outcome is predictable: the ECU sides with BBC Arabic.
“The ECU’s own view of “due accuracy and impartiality” is far removed from any reasonable understanding of honest journalism.”
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservatives, wrote to Mr Davie in February this year to complain about BBC Arabic’s coverage, describing it as a “platform for terrorists” that was promoting “appalling anti-Semitism” to millions of viewers.
BBC Arabic had previously given a platform to journalists who had made extreme anti-Semitic comments.
Ahmed Qannan, a regular BBC Arabic contributor, described a Palestinian who killed four Israeli civilians and a police officer in March 2022 as a “hero”.
When a friend of his posted on Facebook “we want to see some throats cut” in response to a shooting near a Jerusalem synagogue, which claimed the lives of seven civilians on Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2023, Mr Qannan replied: “Don’t give up on your ambition.”
The BBC’s internal review found he had appeared on BBC Arabic 217 times in the 14 months to April 2025.
Ahmed Alagha, who described Israelis as less than human and Jews as “devils”, appeared on BBC Arabic 522 times between November 2023 and April 2025, the BBC’s internal review found.
Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, said: “It has been obvious for a long time that BBC Arabic employs anti-Semites pumping out anti-Israel propaganda – paid for by UK taxpayers – but BBC executives have buried their heads in the sand.
“You would think having to issue so many corrections would raise red flags that there was a problem, but Tim Davie has failed to sort it out. Global news director Jonathan Munro refuses to accept anything is wrong.
“In fact, he said BBC Arabic’s reporters are an ‘unrivalled source of knowledge and editorial content for the wider BBC’. This is deeply concerning and speaks volumes about the BBC’s failings during the Israel-Hamas war.
“The blame lies at the door of BBC executives in London who are only interested in protecting their reputations. The BBC must finally act to stop the rot.”
The BBC has defended its Arabic channel, pointing out that since Oct 7 2023, BBC News Arabic has published more than 11,000 articles on its site and that during the same time period, Camera submitted 159 complaints about content on the site.
A BBC spokesman said: “BBC News Arabic strives for the highest standards of journalism across its services. Whenever mistakes are made or clarifications are needed, we take action to ensure clarity and accuracy for our audiences.
“The Executive Complaints Unit works outside of BBC News and assesses complaints independently.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/09/bbc-forced-to-correct-two-gaza-stories-a-week/ (Archive)
This is quite alarming!
