Gaza: Doctors under attack
Louisa Compton, Channel 4 Head of News and Current Affairs and Specialist Factual and Sport said
The job of journalists is to tell the stories that people need to know. Often, that means telling stories that other people, the people who are subjects of our investigations, would rather were not heard.
Few situations in the world today have illustrated those two truisms more clearly than the October 7 massacres in Israel and the 21 months of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza that followed.
One of the ways in which the reality of that situation has been reported – and to many people’s way of thinking has been under-reported – is the story of how the fighting has embroiled the medical services operating in Gaza.
On Wednesday night, Channel 4 will screen Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, a documentary produced during much of that long period of conflict, which offers powerful evidence that the doctors, nurses and paramedics of Gaza have been denied the non-combatant protection that the norms of warfare usually offer them.
Their hospitals have become combat zones, their very operating theatres have been conscripted into the military theatre of operations.
One side says this has happened through the deliberate choice of their enemy. The other side says it is an unavoidable result of their enemy’s tactics.
Perhaps this is the new normal of warfare, because the whole conflict, from the first murderous moments of the October 7th massacre of innocents to the latest report of machine guns aimed at food queues, has shifted norms in disturbing ways.
In this particular aspect, each side accuses the other of denying medicine its neutrality. The Israel Defence Force says Hamas uses hospitals, patients and medical staff as shields for terrorist headquarters; Gaza’s health authorities and medics accuse the IDF of besieging those hospitals, forcibly evacuating those patients, detaining, terrorising, brutalising and targeting those doctors, nurses and support staff.
In video that is terribly hard to watch and with testimony delivered through tears and anguish, this documentary presents evidence that Israel’s armed forces have deliberately dragged those offering medical aid into the frontline. It also reports the IDF’s strong denials of allegations that medics were tortured.
We are showing this programme because we believe that, following thorough fact-checking and verification, we are presenting a duly impartial view of a subject that both divides opinion and frequently provokes dispute about what constitutes a fact.
Channel 4 has a strong tradition of putting uncomfortable reporting in front of our audiences. In doing so, we know we will antagonise somebody somewhere sometime. But we do it because we believe it is our duty to tell important journalistic stories – especially those that aren’t being told elsewhere.
21.50 edit: Louisa Compton, Channel 4 Head of News and Current Affairs and Specialist Factual and Sport continued
Doctors Under Attack, was commissioned by another broadcaster which took a different view of the original content and decided not to broadcast it.
That other broadcaster will have had its own reasons for not showing the programme. For ourselves, after rigorous fact-checking and assessing the film against our own editorial criteria as well as against all regulatory requirements, we decided that it was both compliant with the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, but also that it was important journalism in the public interest. Any small changes were carried out with the producers to update the film and give viewers as much information as possible.
The result is harrowing, no doubt. It will make people angry, whichever side they take, or if they take no side.
But while we would never judge anyone who decides that showing something could create a risk of being thought to be taking sides, we believe there are times when the same risk is run by not showing anything at all.
dizzy: The other broadcaster referred to is BBC.
