SKWAWKBOX just exposed Starmer and BBC complicity in Israel’s assassination of Al Jazeera journalists

Independent media outlet SKWAWKBOX has spent over ten years holding the powerful and political to account. One perfect example is two articles he released on Tuesday 12 August, where it exposed not only Keir Starmer’s government’s complicity with Israel’s assassination of five Al Jazeera journalists – but also the BBC’s attempt to whitewash the Zionist entity’s war crimes.

The BBC: laying cover for Israel

Firstly, on a live news broadcast on Monday 11 August, the BBC posed what was a despicable question: is it “proportional” for Israel to kill five journalists when it was “only targeting one”?

This chilling formulation, reported by SKWAWKBOX on 12 August, casts the killing of media workers as a matter of arithmetic rather than atrocity—a grotesque inversion of compassion.

Such framing exposes the BBC’s deeper failings in its Gaza war coverage. A thorough analysis by the Centre for Media Monitoring, covering nearly a year of BBC reporting, highlighted a persistent pattern: the minimisation of Palestinian suffering, omissions of critical historical context, and a marked amplification of Israeli propaganda.

This is reinforced by internal dissent: in July 2025, over 400 media professionals—including 121 currently with the BBC—signed a letter condemning what they described as institutional anti‑Palestinian racism and distortion driven by fear of being labelled “anti‑Israel”. 

By couching the murder of journalists in the language of proportionality, the BBC not only dehumanises those who were killed, but also sanitises violence, turning a deliberate assault on press freedom into a cold mathematical debate. In an era where Gaza journalists are being systematically killed—many while clearly identifiable as press—the BBC’s framing is normalising such moral apathy.

Then, SKWAWKBOX also took aim at the Labour Party government.

Starmer: up to his neck in Israel’s war crimes

As the Canary has documented, the RAF has conducted over 500 surveillance flights above Gaza since December 2023, cloaked in secrecy and ostensibly justified as efforts to locate Israeli hostages. 

Yet the evidence is damning. A US‑contracted plane, leased by the MOD for these operations—ostensibly to compensate for a shortage of RAF Shadow R1 jets—was recently exposed after mistakenly revealing its flight path over Khan Younis.

Intelligence gathered by these flights is “routinely shared” with Israeli forces, raising urgent questions about whether the UK is effectively aiding lethal operations—despite its performative rhetoric condemning Israel’s attacks.

So, as SKWAWKBOX concluded:

An outsourced spy plane operating for the UK from the RAF’s Akrotiri base in Cyprus was almost certainly operating over Gaza, despite attempts to hide its flight path, just thirty minutes before an Israeli airstrike that murdered six journalists in the early hours of yesterday morning.

This duplicity is further underscored by the Starmer government’s refusal to release critical footage that could shed light on the killing of British aid workers, even though the RAF had recorded that very moment over Gaza. With civil liberties eroded at home and press freedom murdered abroad, the UK’s role resembles that of an enabler, not a neutral mediator.

Disgraceful

The Labour government’s posture is untenable: searing criticism in words, but enabling complicity in action. Its surveillance flights do not simply observe—they may well abet war crimes. Meanwhile, the BBC’s adoption of such detached, procedural language betrays its purported values of impartiality and humanity. In the face of real death, there is no proportion—only moral clarity.

And overall, the UK state – via the Starmer government and its public service broadcaster – is entirely complicit in Israel’s war crimes. But as always, it is down to independent media like SKWAWKBOX to expose this.

Featured image via the Canary