The Gaza war is the biggest failure of journalism in history.
Some 98 percent of reporters cite casualty figures fabricated by Hamas. Only five percent mention Israeli data. Jihadi propaganda has gone global.
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This is a guest essay written by Jake Wallis Simons, author of “Israelophobia” (Telegraph Book of the Year). His new book “Never Again?” is out in September 2025.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Quite how the BBC got itself into this fix is hard to believe.
Everybody knows that the Gaza Strip is run by Hamas, which exercises total control over every aspect of life, or as many as it can still reach in its depleted state.
Every media organisation operating in Gaza via proxy knows that permissions, information, and access are granted by the jihadi group. Indeed, a captured spokesman named Tarek Abu Shaluf told Israeli authorities that this gives them leverage over the international media; report what we want or we’ll put you on a blacklist and your coverage will come to a swift end.
Therefore, when the prospect of splashing £400,000 ($515,000) on creating a documentary in Gaza by paying people on the ground to gather the footage and directing them “remotely” — which is exactly what happened with the documentary “Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone,” which aired on the BBC following October 7th — it should have been quite obvious there was a significant danger that Hamas would be involved.
As the former Associated Press correspondent Matti Friedman remarked, “Many other media organisations are sitting quietly right now and praying no one examines how they operate in Gaza.”1 A previous member of the international press corps covering the Middle East, he should know.
Yet the naïveté is staggering. The BBC merrily commissioning a cameraman without taking the time to look through his social media account — you guessed it, he has apparently celebrated the killing of Jews2 — and allowing its proxies to set up an ecosystem of propaganda that had very close links, if not direct involvement, of Hamas.
You’ve seen the headlines. All three of the children involved in narrating “Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone” had links to Hamas, including a charismatic little boy called Zakaria, 11 years old, who was later found pictured wearing a jihadi headband and clutching an automatic weapon as he was embraced by a hooded terrorist.
The main star of the programme, Abdullah Al-Yazouri, 13 years old at the time, was revealed by the journalist David Collier to be the son of a Hamas government minister, while the father of another child in the documentary served in the Hamas police and was imprisoned in Israel for terrorism offences.
That this was a propaganda show was obvious from watching the thing. As I observed in The Telegraph, some of the scenes were transparently hammy. “Trying to get drinkable water is a very hard task,” Al-Yazouri told viewers, while clearly visible in the background were stalls selling bottled water, soft drinks, bread, vegetables, clothing, and pet food.
Thereafter, we met 10-year-old Ranat and are told that she had started an “online cooking show with her sister” to take her mind off the “constant pressure of this war.” We see her choosing vegetables in the outdoor market and shopping in a small supermarket bursting with abundance.
“I love cooking and creating food content,” she said. There followed further scenes of people eating kebabs, buying sweets, and pumping iron in a gym with bottles of iced water.
Talk about confirmation bias. After shamefully standing by the programme and trying to weather the storm, the BBC has finally capitulated and is conducting an investigation. But it seems safe to assume that the eagerness of staff to produce a documentary on the innocent suffering souls of Gaza, who are ground under the “Zionist jackboot,” might have had something to do with it.
As The Telegraph drily reported: “There are suggestions that within the BBC there was a sense that executives were so pleased to have managed to produce a film out of Gaza from the perspective of children that they were ‘blinded’ to any problems in the making of it.”
Which brings me to the point. The executives at our national broadcaster will surely be aware that under the Terrorism Act 2000, it is a criminal offence to provide “material support, such as the provision of money” to a proscribed terrorist organisation. Like, say, Hamas.
The organization UK Lawyers for Israel has asked counter-terrorism police to urgently investigate whether any payments were made by the film production company to anybody connected to the terror group.
If it turns out that this did indeed occur, the BBC may find itself facing scrutiny of a different sort, one that brings with it the threat of imprisonment. I wouldn’t wish this on anybody, of course. But perhaps it would be exactly the wake-up call the broadcaster needs.
When the results of the new study into the Hamas casualty figures were released last night, much of the findings were sadly as expected.3 The Gaza authorities fail to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, giving the impression that the 44,000 dead were all civilians.
Hamas has over-reported fatalities of women and children, even counting those who had died before the start of the war. About 5,000 naturally occurring deaths, including those lost to cancer, have been added to the tally of “victims.” The age of the casualties has been systematically revised downwards to inflate the number of “children” killed.
This confirmed and enhanced the seminal work first of Abraham Wyner4 (a professor of statistics and data science at the University of Pennsylvania), and then of Tom Simpson (economist), Lewi Stone (biomathematician professor), and Gregory Rose (professor specializing in international law in the Arab-Israeli conflict).5
But one piece of research stood out.
According to the new report — produced by Andrew Fox for the Henry Jackson Society — only five percent of the media organisations surveyed cited casualty figures issued by the Israeli authorities. By contrast, 98 percent used those provided by the Hamas-controlled health ministry.6
This means that almost all Western media outlets have unflinchingly disseminated Hamas propaganda to their tens of millions of viewers while disregarding Israeli figures almost entirely. The world’s journalists have taken the word of jihadi butchers above the evidence-based testimony of a friendly democracy and shared this narrative with the world.
It is no exaggeration to say that this comprises the most scandalous betrayal of journalistic ethics in history. The fact that it has received little attention in the press only confirms a herd instinct to cover the backs of colleagues.
It doesn’t stop there. Every piece of footage released from Gaza has been subjected to censorship by Hamas. That has been the case for years; during the 2014 conflict, a rare lapse in Hamas censorship allowed an Indian film crew to film some terrorists firing rockets from a residential area.7 Despite happening thousands of times during the war, this was the one and only time such a scene had been caught on camera. It caused a global sensation.
The world’s media knows full well that Hamas is the gatekeeper of film from Gaza. They know that as a result, their viewers will never see any evidence of dead or wounded terrorists on their screens, only dead or injured civilians. Any ethical broadcaster would screen such material with a health warning: “The following footage has been censored by Hamas.” But not a single one has done so.
This has been profoundly effective in turning public opinion against Israel. Day in, day out, viewers are told that the IDF has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, with no mention made of the fact that about half of them were terrorists. This is accompanied by footage of heartrending carnage that has had all the terrorists edited out. As a result, people naturally conclude that Israel is conducting a “genocide,” believing that they have seen the evidence with their own eyes.
In a video of an Israeli interrogation of Tarek Abu Shaluf, a captured Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman, he reveals exactly how the terrorists play the media, and how journalists are willingly complicit in this misinformation campaign.
“The international media differs from the Arab ones,” he said at one point. “They focus on humanitarian issues. We don’t speak to them in the language of violence, destruction, and revenge.”
Reporters know full well that the propaganda they are given is fabricated, he adds, but they broadcast it to the world anyway so that Hamas doesn’t stop cooperating. “They need us for more interviews,” he said.
The results can be seen in the polls. In October 2023, Britons were almost twice as likely to hold Hamas most responsible for the war than the Israeli government. After a year of misinformation in the media, however, 60 percent considered Israel’s military actions to have gone too far in Gaza, with only 12 percent thinking it was “about right.” In turn, the weight of public opinion affects government policy, isolating the Jewish state and placing it under huge international pressure to let the jihadis survive.
The truth, of course, is that Israel has killed about one civilian for every one combatant in Gaza. Every single such death is a profound tragedy, but as numerous international experts in urban warfare have confirmed, this rate of collateral damage is lower than any other army has accomplished in history, including the British and American armed forces.
Yet such has been the power of Hamas propaganda, enabled by a complicit international media, that anybody who tells the truth about this war is laughed out of the room. It is no exaggeration to say that this monstrous act of collusion with our jihadi enemies is the darkest chapter of journalism in history.
Matti Friedman on X
“BBC Gaza documentary cameraman appears to celebrate October 7 attacks.” The Telegraph.
“Number of civilians killed in Gaza ‘inflated to vilify Israel’.” The Telegraph.
“How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers.” Tablet.
“Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures.” Fathom.
“Figures on Palestinian casualties are Hamas propaganda and should be treated as such.” The Telegraph.
“Indian TV Crew Shows Rare Video of Rocket Launch From.” The New York Times.
 | A guest post by
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We'd have to be very naive to believe that these mistakes were not intentional. As the article pointed out, there was a willful blindness at the BBC. That statement is putting it mildly.
Britain, Canada, Ireland, Australia, these countries have been actively part of the Hamas disinformation campaign throughout the war.
I recall PM Trudeau in Canada saying the Israeli killing of babies must stop.
The media coverage began at 6:30 AM on October 7, 2023, as Gazans took over an Israeli tank, photojournalist Ali Mahmud who was one of several photojournalists who traveled with the terrorists into Israel covered the attack.
What was he doing on the border with his camera at 6:29 am walking his dog?
Six freelance photographers, who had contributed to Associated Press and Reuters.. were identified as Hassan Eslaiah, Yousef Masoud, Ali Mahmud, Hatem Ali, Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa and Yasser Qudih.
It is believed that they were aware of the Hamas terror attack before it took place.
Ali Mahmud, who contributed to the Associated Press and accompanied the Hamas terrorists during the 7 October attack in Israel, won the Team Picture Story of the Year awarded by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, the award is handed out annually by the Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri in the United States. His photo? The young Shani Louk's body which was paraded around Gaza in the back of a pickup truck.
Several other photographs showing the aftermath of the Hamas terror attack and Israel’s military action in Gaza, mostly taken by AP Photojournalists, have been selected for the award.
Of course the terrorists documented their carnage on body cams as well.
CNN made a point of telling employees to use the term "militants" and not terrorists.
Honest reporting did quiet a bit of research on who did what.
https://www.opindia.com/2024/03/photographer-who-accompanied-hamas-terrorists-during-7-october-attack-wins-prestigious-award/