A pro-Palestine protest outside the BBC. (Photo: Monica Wells / Alamy)
Britain’s ‘public service broadcaster’ is keeping the public in the dark about UK support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, new research finds.
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Our research into the BBC’s written outputs since October 2023 finds the corporation has mainly not reported at all the major ways the UK government has been working with Israel.
It found that the BBC has reported just four times in 15 months that the Royal Air Force (RAF) has been conducting surveillance flights over Gaza.
Only one BBC report on the subject has been written since December 2023, despite the fact that hundreds of such spy missions have been conducted, almost daily, in aid of Israeli intelligence.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says these flights are solely to aid the rescue of hostages held by Hamas. Only one BBC online report mentions the UK may be providing targeting information to Israel or flying weapons to the country.
None of the articles otherwise raise concerns about the UK being willing to collaborate militarily with Israel at a time it is devastating Gaza.
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Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, said: “The BBC is clearly utterly failing to inform the public about how the UK military and government is complicit in the horrors of Gaza. This is a national scandal, showing how far away the corporation is from being a public service broadcaster.”
He added: “The BBC’s failure to accurately report on Israel’s genocide in Gaza is as much to do with what it refuses to report as with what it does report. It is high time for the corporation to be truly held to account and be reformed in the public interest”.
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A BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC News teams are editorially independent and make their own decisions about what to cover and how to cover it.
“We have reported the Gaza-Israel conflict in great depth and consistently across our programmes and services since 7 October 2023, ensuring audiences are kept updated with the latest developments as well as providing comprehensive analysis.
“We hold ourselves to the highest journalistic standards and have reported the conflict impartially – without fear or favour.”
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference at the QEII Centre, London, November 25, 2024
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Leading left MP and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell issued the warning to Rachel Reeves as the Chancellor returned from her China trip to confront the bond market crisis.
Mr McDonnell, presently suspended from the Labour whip for opposing the cruel two-child benefit cap, told BBC radio: “There is obviously a problem.
“There’s turbulence in the international markets, and we’ve just got to see those through.
“You don’t turn to cuts, certainly, because not only will that be politically suicidal, that would undermine the political support upon which Labour got elected.
“In addition to that, you would be taking demand out of the economy, and you would be looking at turning a crisis into a recession.
“So I think you just have to see through the turbulence in the markets.”
Mr McDonnell also reminded the government that voters matter more than markets.
People gather for a funeral ceremony of Palestinian journalist Saed Sabri Abu Nabhan after he is fatally shot by an Israeli sniper while on duty in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the central Gaza Strip on January 11, 2025 [Ashraf Amra – Anadolu Agency]
A dramatic escape was cited by Israeli media as the reason that Yuval Vagdani, a soldier in the Israeli army, managed to escape justice in Brazil.
Vagdani was accused by a Palestinian advocacy legal group, the Hind Rajab Foundation, of carrying out well-documented crimes in Gaza. He is not the only Israeli soldier being pursued for similar crimes.
According to the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation (KAN), more than 50 Israeli soldiers are being pursued in countries ranging from South Africa to Sri Lanka to Sweden.
In one case, the Hind Rajab Foundation filed a complaint in a Swedish court against Boaz Ben David, an Israeli sniper from the 932 Battalion of the Israeli Nahal Brigade. He is also accused of committing war crimes in Gaza.
The Nahal Brigade has been at the heart of numerous war crimes in Gaza. Established in 1982, the brigade is notorious for its unhinged violence against Occupied Palestinians. Their role in the latest genocidal atrocities in the Strip has far exceeded their own dark legacy.
Even if these 50 individuals are apprehended and sentenced, the price exacted from the Israeli army pales in comparison to the crimes carried out.
Numbers, though helpful, are rarely enough to convey collective pain. The medical journal Lancet’s latest report is still worthy of reflection. Using a new data-collecting method called ‘capture–recapture analysis’, the report indicates that, by the first nine months of the war, between October 2023 and June 2024, 64,260 Palestinians have been killed.
Still, capturing and trying Israeli war criminals is not just about the fate of these individuals. It is about accountability—an absent term in the history of Israeli human rights violations, war crimes and recurring genocides against Palestinians.
The Israeli government understands that the issue now goes beyond individuals. It is about the loss of Israel’s historic status as a country that stands above the law.
As a result, the Israeli army announced that it decided not to publicly reveal the names of soldiers involved in the Gaza war and genocide, fearing prosecution in international courts.
However, this step is unlikely to make much difference for two reasons. First, numerous pieces of evidence against individual soldiers, whose identities are publicly known, have already been gathered or are available for future investigation. Second, much of the documentation of war crimes has been unwittingly produced by Israeli soldiers themselves.
Reassured about the lack of accountability, Israeli soldiers have taken countless pieces of footage showing the abuse and torture of Palestinians in Gaza. This self-indictment will likely serve as a major body of evidence in future trials.
All of this cannot be viewed separately from the ongoing investigation into the Israeli genocide in Gaza by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Additionally, arrest warrants have been issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against top Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Though these cases have moved slowly, they have set a precedent that even Israel is not immune to some measure of international accountability and justice.
Moreover, these cases have granted countries that are signatories to the ICC and ICJ the authority to investigate individual war crimes cases filed by human rights and legal advocacy groups.
Though the Hind Rajab Foundation is not the only group pursuing Israeli war criminals globally, the group’s name derives from a five-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza who was murdered by the Israeli army in January 2024, along with her family. This tragedy and that particular name are a reminder that the innocent blood of Palestinians will not go in vain.
Though justice may be delayed, as long as there are pursuers, it will someday be attained.
Pursuing alleged Israeli war criminals in international and national courts is just the start of a process of accountability that will last many years. With every case, Israel will learn that the decades-long US vetoes and blind Western protection and support will no longer suffice.
It was the West’s shameless shielding of Israel throughout the years that allowed Israeli leaders to behave as they saw fit for Israel’s so-called national security—even if it meant the very extermination of the Palestinian people, as is the case today in Gaza.
Still, Western governments, including the US and Britain, continue to treat wanted Israelis as sanctified heroes—not war criminals. This goes beyond accusations of double standards. It is the highest immorality and disregard for international law.
Things need to change; in fact, they are already changing.
Since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, Tel Aviv has already learned many difficult lessons. For example, its army is no longer “invincible”, its economy is relatively small and highly dependent, and its political system is fragile. In times of crisis, it is barely operable.
It is time for Israel to learn yet another lesson: that the age of accountability has begun. Dancing around the corpses of dead Palestinians in Gaza is no longer an amusing social media post, as Israeli soldiers once thought.
Image of Alphabeti Spagetti by Steven Feather, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has today launched its first strategic market status (SMS) investigation under the new digital markets competition regime which came into force on 1 January 2025. The investigation will assess Google’s position in search and search advertising services and how this impacts consumers and businesses including advertisers, news publishers, and rival search engines.
Google’s search services are a gateway through which millions of people and businesses access and navigate the internet. In the UK, Google accounts for more than 90% of all general search queries, and more than 200,000 UK advertisers use Google’s search advertising.
