https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-bbc-edit-no-one-will-resign-over/

Failure to air footage of Israeli soldiers executing unarmed Palestinians shows the corporation’s true bias

When it was revealed in November 2025 that a BBC programme edited a section of Donald Trump’s speech on 6 January 2021 to reinforce the idea that the freshly deposed president was calling on his supporters to take violent action at the US Capitol, both the director general and head of news resigned and the corporation immediately apologised for its behaviour.

Shortly after this, the BBC was guilty of a far less dramatic, but equally revealing dodgy edit that will lead to no resignations and no apology because, far from undermining the BBC’s editorial values, it’s an everyday expression of the corporation’s deployment of “due impartiality” when it comes to reporting Israeli violence.

On 27 November, Israeli forces executed two unarmed Palestinian men in Jenin in the occupied West Bank, an event captured in full on CCTV and replayed on headlines across the globe. 

The BBC reported the story across all its news platforms, including on its main TV news bulletin that night. Yet the BBC cut away just before the soldiers opened fire. “We’re going to lose the pictures at this moment,” reporter Jon Donnison said on air.

The BBC didn’t “lose the pictures”; it decided deliberately not to show them. Its own guidelines say: “In the immediate aftermath of an event involving death, suffering or distress, the use of more graphic material may be justified to provide a reasonable account of the full horror.”

Moreover, Donnison went out of his way to qualify the actions of the soldiers saying that the men “appear to be surrendering” and then “appear” to be ordered back into a building from where “Israeli soldiers appear to open fire and shoot them dead at point-blank range”.

Other news outlets, however, transmitted pictures of the whole assassination and even inside Israel itself, Haaretz used far more direct language in its reporting: “Israeli Border Police officers were filmed on Thursday, fatally shooting two Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin after they had surrendered”. Neither the word “appear”, nor any conditional phrases are used anywhere in the story.

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Continues at https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-bbc-edit-no-one-will-resign-over/