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BBC presenters put Israel’s case in 252 interviews but the Palestinian case in only 15, study finds

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A view of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Headquarters in London, United Kingdom on July 14, 2023. [Raşid Necati Aslım – Anadolu Agency]

BBC News presenters repeatedly put Israel’s position to guests who criticised its conduct in Gaza, but rarely put the Palestinian position to guests who defended Israel, a new study of three years of the corporation’s coverage of the Gaza genocide has found.

The study, BBC: The Would Say Files, was published on 5 November by the media monitoring platform NewsCord and written by Nima Akram. It examined broadcast interviews and written articles from October 2023 to this month. 

The researchers searched the subtitles of more than 51,000 BBC News channel programmes for phrases such as ‘Israel would say’, then checked each result by hand to confirm that a presenter was putting one side’s position to a guest from the other side.

Of 267 such interviews, BBC presenters put Israel’s case to critics of Israel in 252. They put the Palestinian case to Israel’s defenders in 15. The plainest form, “Israel would say”, was put to critics in 75 interviews, while “Palestinians would say”, or the same phrase naming any Palestinian group, was put to defenders in four.

NewsCord has compiled clips of these exchanges to show the scale of the gap. Its compilation of BBC presenters putting Israel’s case runs to 48 minutes and 12 seconds. The compilation of presenters putting the Palestinian case runs to 2 minutes and 38 seconds.

The study also found that the Palestinian case almost disappeared from BBC interviews after the first weeks of the genocide. Ten of the 15 cases came in the six weeks after 7 October 2023, and only five in the three years that followed. Presenters were still putting Israel’s case to its critics in 2026. NewsCord says this points to an editorial shift, in which the BBC stopped conveying what Palestinians were saying but continued to tell audiences what “Israel would say”.

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The same imbalance appeared in the BBC’s written coverage. In 1,618 articles, when the BBC reported criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, it added Israel’s position 49 per cent of the time (1,771 of 3,648 claims). When it reported Israel’s claims, it added a Palestinian or UN position 38 per cent of the time (914 of 2,431), and a Palestinian position alone only 25 per cent of the time.

The gap was wider when the researchers compared official sources. When the authorities in Gaza made a claim against Israel, the BBC added Israel’s response 58 per cent of the time (334 of 575). When the Israeli government or army made a claim, it added a Palestinian or UN position 39 per cent of the time (855 of 2,165).

Looked at article by article, 71 per cent of articles reporting criticism of Israel gave Israel’s position at least once, compared with 53 per cent of articles reporting Israel’s claims that gave a Palestinian or UN position. NewsCord said this means Israel’s claims went entirely unchallenged in almost half of the articles in which it made them.

The study cites a ruling by the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit on an interview broadcast on 3 November 2023. In that ruling, the unit defended putting opposing views to public figures, saying this does not mean an interviewer endorses them. NewsCord’s findings question whether that principle has been applied equally to both sides. The full report, including every broadcast and article in the study, is free to read online.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence on the BBC’s coverage of Palestine. In 2024, a study by the Centre for Media Monitoring found that British media consistently favoured Israeli narratives over Palestinian perspectives in the first month of the genocide. An investigation by journalist Owen Jones, based on interviews with 13 current and former BBC journalists, described how senior figures skewed coverage in Israel’s favour and ignored internal complaints. The BBC also faced criticism for declining to air Gaza: Medics Under Fire, a documentary on attacks on Palestinian healthcare workers. More than 600 media figures signed a letter in 2025 urging the corporation to broadcast it.

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This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

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