You may have thought BBC pro-Israel propaganda couldn’t get much worse. But if you did, you were wrong. Because it’s doubling down.
During Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the BBC has been an expert at omitting key information and context while focusing people’s attention on Hamas to distract from the settler-colonial power’s crimes. And now, as the apartheid state consciously emulates “Nazi starvation tactics” in the occupied Palestinian territory, the BBC has decided it’s a good time to step up its efforts to convince you that the big bad Hamas has been forcing poor little Israel to commit heinous war crimes.
BBC propaganda plumbs new depths
At the start of a BBC segment about a new Israeli crime, the broadcaster deftly shifted focus away from Israel by forcing viewer’s attention onto Hamas. Mentioning the group twice before even naming Israel, the presenter said:
Reports are emerging of another fatal incident near a distribution centre in Hamas-controlled Gaza… A spokesman for the Hamas-run civil defence agency says Israeli troops killed 24 people
So now people don't die in Gaza, they die in "Hamas controlled Gaza" pic.twitter.com/mFMDosRyK9
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) June 3, 2025
This isn’t an accident. This is very deliberate wording with a very clear purpose – to take the focus and blame away from Israel. Because of the overwhelming evidence of the settler-colonial state’s crimes, its defenders know this type of propaganda is essential.
Because what’s happening in Gaza is not a ‘war’. It’s a barrage of war crimes (as the UN, the International Criminal Court (ICC), numerous countries, and human rights organisations have been saying for months). And countless legal, academic, and human rights experts have described the assault as a genocide. As UN expert Francesca Albanese has insisted, “Israel didn’t have the right to wage a war against the Palestinians in Gaza” because:
It cannot claim the right of self-defence against a threat that emanates from a territory it occupies
International law does, however, protect the right of Palestinian people to resist Israeli occupation. And that’s what Hamas did in 2023 after Israel had spent many years turning Gaza into “the world’s largest open-air prison” and isolating its highly concentrated population with a brutal blockade. Israel has responded in the last 20 months by killing at least one Palestinian child every hour in Gaza, murdered around 17,000 children including about 825 babies, 895 one-year-olds, 3,266 preschoolers, and 4,032 six-to-10-year-olds.
This is not what the BBC wants you to focus on, though.
Don’t let it get away with this
The BBC has used the term “Hamas-controlled Gaza” for many years to cover for Israel. But it has largely avoided doing so since the start of the ongoing genocide. In the last week, however, this has begun again.
As academic Des Freedman has insisted:
while other outlets are finally turning away from ‘Hamas-run’ & ‘Hamas-controlled’, the BBC is fiercely clinging on to language that serves one purpose: to discredit Palestinian perspectives.
Journalist Owen Jones, meanwhile, asserted that:
The implication of this phrase is that Israel is not an occupying force with all of the legal implications that come with it.
As the BBC doubles down on its pro-Israel propaganda, so too must the campaign to hold it to account for its complicity in genocide.
You can make a complaint to the BBC here.
Featured image via screengrab
