The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza

By Owen Jones

Photo by DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images

The BBC is facing an internal revolt over its reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza.

Their primary battlefield has become the online news operation. Drop Site News spoke to 13 current and former staffers who mapped out the extensive bias in the BBC’s coverage and how their demands for change have been largely met with silence from management. At times, these journalists point out, the coverage has been more credulous about Israeli claims than the UK’s own Conservative leaders and the Israeli media, while devaluing Palestinian life, ignoring atrocities, and creating a false equivalence in an entirely unbalanced conflict.

The BBC journalists who spoke to Drop Site News believe the imbalance is structural, and has been enforced by the top brass for many years; all of them requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution. The journalists also overwhelmingly point to the role of one person in particular: Raffi Berg, BBC News online’s Middle East editor. Berg sets the tone for the BBC’s digital output on Israel and Palestine, they say. They also allege that internal complaints about how the BBC covers Gaza have been repeatedly brushed aside. “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” one former BBC journalist said.

In November, the journalists’ outrage at the Corporation’s overall coverage spilled out into the open after more than 100 BBC employees signed a letter accusing the organization, along with other broadcasters, of failing to adhere to its own editorial standards. The BBC lacked “consistently fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza” across its platforms, they wrote. The employees also requested that the BBC make a series of specific changes:

reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza, making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims, highlighting the extent to which Israeli sources are reliable, making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines, providing proportionate representation of experts in war crimes and crimes against humanity, including regular historical context predating October 2023, use of consistent language when discussing both Israeli and Palestinian deaths, and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews.

One BBC journalist told me that the letter was “a last resort after several tried to engage using the usual channels with management and were just ignored.” Another journalist tells me they hadn’t signed the letter because they weren’t aware of it, stating the strength of feeling went “way beyond” the signatories.

BBC management has rejected claims that such dissent has been ignored. In the reply sent by Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News, which Drop Site News obtained, Turness told them to “please note we would not normally reply to unsigned, anonymous correspondence,” adding that “BBC News is proud of its journalism and always open to discussion about it, but this is made more difficult when parties are not willing to do so openly and transparently.” She claimed the BBC engaged with internal BBC staff and “external stakeholders” on coverage of Israel and Palestine, and argued “the BBC does not and cannot reflect any single world view, and reports without fear of [sic] favour.” One BBC journalist told me this reflected the BBC’s desire to “frame this as an identity politics issue, when it’s not. It’s about not blindly accepting the Israeli line.” Another called it “very patronizing.”

Email from Deborah Turness

The internal critique peaked again in December, after journalists say the BBC failed to highlight Amnesty International’s report concluding that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Senior correspondents expressed their dismay at the angle chosen for the limited broadcast coverage. In a WhatsApp group of senior Middle East correspondents, editors, and producers—referred to as ‘the big dogs’ by BBC management—one posted the chyron during coverage on the BBC news channel: “Israel rejects ‘fabricated’ claims of genocide.” Another commented: ‘FFS!!—It’s an open goal for those who say we’re frit [afraid] of upsetting the Israelis and keep on couching our stories in an ‘Israel says’ narrative’. As one BBC journalist puts it to me: “These are established senior correspondents—and it’s even bothering them.”

In response to this criticism by their own senior journalists, a BBC spokesperson said: “We take feedback on our coverage seriously, but criticism of BBC output based on a single screenshot taken during a few seconds of coverage, or on false assertions that topics ‘haven’t been covered’ when they have is invalid and disingenuous.”

Another strapline was also used that day: “Amnesty International accuses Israel of genocide.” While it was discussed on BBC radio stations, journalists note that the report was not covered at all on the BBC’s flagship news programmes—BBC One’s News At One, News At Six or News At Ten or its flagship current affairs programme, BBC Two’s Newsnight. According to broadcast regulator Ofcom, BBC One is the most frequented news source in Britain. On December 5, the day the Amnesty report was released, 3.7 million viewers tuned into the BBC News At Six alone. The News Channel attracts only a small fraction of that audience.

The Amnesty International report was also not afforded proper attention by BBC online, the staffers say. It appeared on the BBC front page, but long after the embargo on reporting ended, leading award-winning TV producer Richard Sanders to ask “Why on earth did it take them 12 hours?” Even then, it appeared as the seventh item in order of importance. And for a week after it was reported, the story about the world’s most famous human rights organization concluding that Israel was committing genocide did not appear in the ‘Israel-Gaza war’ index tab which remains fixed at the top of the BBC news front page. The BBC told Drop Site News that this was a mistake. The Amnesty story was added to the index several days after the report was released, meaning traffic to the story was suppressed.

According to data seen by BBC journalists, in the first few days the story received around 120,000 hits. One BBC journalist suggests that—if it had been on the Israel-Gaza index featured on the BBC news front page—it would have attracted far more traffic. They note a story which appeared on the Israel-Gaza index and was just one day older, concerning the recovery of the body of an Israeli hostage from Gaza, garnered around 370,000 hits.

In addition to what they see as a collective management failure, journalists expressed concerns over bias in the shaping of the Middle East index of the BBC news website. Several allege that Berg “micromanages” this section, ensuring that it fails to uphold impartiality. “Many of us have raised concerns that Raffi has the power to reframe every story, and we are ignored,” one told me.

The BBC journalists also point to Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, and Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC’s news division, as standing in the way of change. Both are aware of the outrage against Berg, the journalists said. “Almost every correspondent you know has an issue with him,” one said. “He has been named in multiple meetings, but they just ignore it.”

It is difficult to overstate the influence of the BBC’s online operation. According to media watchdog Press Gazette, the BBC news website, which includes both news and non-news content, is the most-visited news site on the internet. In May alone, it had 1.1 billion visits, dwarfing second-place finisher msn.com, which had 686 million visits.

Berg’s influence has a ripple effect, the journalists say. While BBC broadcasters write and produce their own reports, editors and reporters across the organization frequently draw on web articles such as those edited by Berg to flesh out their stories. “Part of the problem is that the staff on Today [the BBC’s flagship radio current affairs programme] and domestic outlets in general are pretty ignorant about Israel/Gaza,” says one BBC journalist, “as anyone who goes to work there from World Service realizes very quickly.” BBC news broadcasts are centered on coverage by veteran journalists with on-the-ground experience like Jeremy Bowen who are regarded as more balanced.

In response to a request for comment, the BBC said it unequivocally stood by Berg’s work and that Drop Site News’s descriptions of Berg “fundamentally misdescribe this person’s role, and misunderstand the way the BBC works.” The organization rejected “any suggestion of a ‘lenient stance’” towards Israel or Palestine, and asserted that the BBC was “the world’s most trusted international news source” and that its “coverage should be judged on its own merits and in its entirety.”

“If we make mistakes we correct them,” the BBC said. More on that later.

“This is about editorial standards”

In November 2023, BBC senior management attended a morning meeting with at least 100 staffers to discuss coverage of Gaza. It soon descended into a fiery debate. “We’ve got to all remember that this all started on 7 October,” Deborah Turness, the CEO of the news division, called out, in an attempt to assert control of the meeting, two attendees told me. Liliane Landour, the former head of the BBC World Service, disagreed, pointing to the decades of Israeli occupation before October 7: “No, I’m going to have to say that’s not the case, and I’m sure that’s not how you meant to phrase it.” People were “livid” about Turness’s remarks, one journalist said. When asked for comment, the BBC pointed to a blog post Turness authored in October 2023 detailing the organization’s approach to the conflict.

Internal tensions over the BBC’s coverage of Gaza had been rising for weeks. On October 24, Rami Ruhayem, a Beirut-based BBC Arabic correspondent, sent an email to Tim Davie, BBC’s director general, laying out the concerns he and his fellow journalists had shared about the organization’s lack of impartiality in its Gaza coverage. While stories “prominently” used words like “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “atrocities” to refer to Hamas, they “hardly, if at all,” used them “in reference to actions by Israel,” he wrote.

Ruhayem singled out the use of the word “massacre,” in particular, which the BBC had not used to describe mass slaughters perpetrated by Israeli forces. By contrast, on October 10, 2023, the organization published a story with the headline “Supernova festival: How massacre unfolded from verified video and social media.”

Ruhayem also noted the organization-wide failure to frame reporting and analysis around Israeli statements signifying war crimes and genocidal intent. He pointed out the lack of “historical context,” emphasizing that “apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler-colonialism” were “terms used by many experts and highly respected organizations to which the BBC usually defers.”

On October 31, 2023, for example, the BBC published a story with a headline that excised Israel’s role: “Israel Gaza: Father loses 11 family members in one blast.” When the BBC does mention Israel as a perpetrator, including when large numbers of civilians are killed by its missiles, the organization’s headlines use the caveat “reportedly.” The BBC repeats the Israeli authorities’ use of “evacuate” to describe the forcible transfer of civilians—effectively using a euphemism for a war crime. Instead of describing Israel’s total siege on Gaza for what it is, an all-encompassing blockade on aid was framed in an October 20, 2023 headline as “Israel aims to cut Gaza ties after war with Hamas.”

In November, around the same time as the meeting with Turness, eight BBC journalists sent a 2,300-word letter to Al Jazeera outlining how their employer had failed to accurately depict the Israel-Palestine story “through omission and lack of critical engagement with Israel’s claims” and a “double standard in how civilians are seen.” In the preceding weeks, the BBC had either buried or failed to report on a number of official statements announcing Israel’s intent to perpetrate war crimes. Defense minister Yoav Gallant’s commitment to impose a “full siege” on Gaza and its “human animals” received just one mention in BBC online content, towards the end of an article headlined “Israel’s military says it fully controls communities on Gaza border.” No context about the illegality of the statement was offered. A statement by Israeli General Ghassan Alian addressed to both Hamas and “the residents of Gaza”—which unambiguously denounced the Palestinians of Gaza as “human beasts” and promised a total blockade on life’s essentials and the unleashing of “damage” and “hell”—was not covered at all.

By comparison, weeks after the start of the war in Ukraine, the BBC’s online coverage clearly identified war crimes committed by Russia, even without official rulings from international courts. “Gruesome evidence points to war crimes on road outside Kyiv,” read one headline 36 days into the invasion. After October 7, war crimes committed by Hamas were treated as objective fact requiring no legal verdict: “Israeli community frozen as Hamas atrocities continue emerge.” When strong evidence similarly shows Israel committing atrocities, the same editorial guidance does not apply.

“They wanted to turn it into a ‘Muslim thing,’ that ‘we’re worried about your community.’ We said, ‘We appreciate your concern about our mental health, but this is about editorial standards.’”

In the weeks after October 7, a number of BBC journalists began venting their intense frustrations in forums like WhatsApp groups, where they collected the “bullshit reasons given for not commissioning stories.” They singled out Berg, one of whom says plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of “systematic Israeli propaganda.” After staffers were told by the BBC’s top brass to come forward with any concerns about coverage, in meetings with senior management, journalists have flagged numerous examples of problematic editing by Berg. Again, having been invited to do so by BBC management, journalists have sent large numbers of emails identifying problems with such news stories. Staff members report rarely receiving responses to such emails.

Instead, the BBC’s approach has been to pathologize the problem. In early November 2023, management convened several roundtables, described as “listening sessions,” where, as one attendee told me, it became clear that management sought to recast factual objections and bias concerns raised by staff as emotional struggles. “They said they were concerned about mental health [and] offered the telephone number of the BBC support group,” one journalist who attended said.

“They wanted to turn it into a ‘Muslim thing,’ that ‘we’re worried about your community.’ We said, ‘We appreciate your concern about our mental health, but this is about editorial standards. It’s about being a public service broadcaster and impartiality not being abided by. They realized they’d let the genie out of the bottle. We said: ‘What’s the next session? We want a progress report, collating the evidence.’” Another attendee said management told staff to “be as frank as possible” and that it sought “honest thoughts on coverage.” Despite management efforts to pigeonhole the objections to BBC’s coverage, the internal dissent extended far beyond Muslim staff.

“It was quite bad, staff were not treated well,” says one BBC journalist. “They were speaking their mind, then being shut down. They were told to be honest, but managers didn’t want that and snapped.” Since the meeting with Turness in November, staffers have asked, on three occasions, for updates on whether there had been any progress on responding to and acting on claims about biased coverage. “Three times there has been nothing back,” one staffer said.

In March 2024, the Centre for Media Monitoring, a watchdog group established by the Muslim Council of Britain, released “Media Bias: Gaza 2023-24,” a 150-page document detailing numerous allegations against the BBC’s reporting on Israel and Gaza. That included stripping away context such as Israel’s occupation of Palestine and siege of Gaza, far greater use of emotive language to describe Israeli suffering or deaths than that used when the victims are Palestinians and a pattern that BBC’s position “has often been to push the Israeli line whilst casting doubt on Pro-Palestinian voices.”

The BBC journalists said they presented the document to Richard Burgess, the BBC‘s director of news content who oversees content across BBC platforms. His response: He did not “recognize the bias.”

The BBC’s headquarters was splashed with red paint by pro-Palestinian activists from Palestine Action on October 14, 2023 in London, United Kingdom. Photo by Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images.

Without Fear or Favor

Between November 2023 and July 2024, BBC management held five listening sessions on Israel-Gaza. In a group meeting with Davie in May 2024, staffers at the meeting acknowledged the pressure the BBC faced from pro-Israel lobbyists. They also emphasized that their sole objective was to uphold the BBC’s values of fairness and impartiality and to produce content “without fear or favor”—principles staffers told me had been cast aside in deference to Israeli narratives. They also noted examples of individual senior journalists who had sent dozens of complaints about coverage of Israel and Gaza, only to be consistently brushed off.

The staffers also identified the website, headed by Berg, as the BBC’s most egregious violator of editorial standards on impartiality on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Davie, BBC’s director-general, was already aware that many BBC journalists had specific concerns about Berg. “He did very little to hide his objective of watering down anything critical of Israel,” said a former BBC journalist.

Berg wasn’t the only senior figure discussed at the meeting in May. The role of another powerful individual raised Robbie Gibb—one of five people who serve on the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee along with Director-General Tim Davie, BBC News CEO Deborah Turness, the Chairman of the Arts Council Nicholas Serota, and BBC Chair Samir Shah. In September 2024, when discussing “the Israel-Gaza story,” Shah told British parliamentarians that the committee was “part of the process where complaints are discussed, talked about and addressed.” He added that the BBC’s next “thematic review” should focus on Israel and Palestine.

Gibb is charged with helping to define the BBC’s commitment to impartiality, and to respond to complaints about the BBC’s coverage on Israel and Palestine—but his ultra-partisan record speaks for itself. The brother of a former Conservative minister, he is a veteran of the revolving door between Britain’s worlds of media and politics. In his thirties, Gibb was the chief of staff for Conservative MP Francis Maude before becoming deputy political editor of Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship current affairs show, and, later, editor of BBC politics programs. Between 2017 and 2019, he served as director of communications for Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, and was knighted by her upon her resignation. In 2020, Gibb also led a consortium to rescue the Jewish Chronicle from bankruptcy. In 2021, Gibb returned to the BBC, joining its board as a non-executive director. In 2022, former senior BBC journalist Emily Maitlis described Gibb as an “active agent of the Conservative party” who shaped the broadcaster’s coverage by acting “as the arbiter of BBC impartiality.” Similarly, Lewis Goodall, her colleague, said editors told him to “be careful: Robbie is watching you.”

Gibb’s deep involvement with the Jewish Chronicle continued after he took up his BBC role. In the November 2023 BBC Declaration of Personal Interests, he declared he was the 100% owner of the newspaper, before being replaced by a venture capitalist in August 2024. One former Jewish Chronicle journalist declared that, “since the change in ownership, the paper has read more like a propaganda sheet for Benjamin Netanyahu,” and that Gibb regularly appeared in the office “to check up on what stories were topping the news list and offering a view.” Since the acquisition, Jake Wallis Simons, its editor since 2021, has focused on zealously supporting Israel’s onslaught since October 2023. In one example, he tweeted a video of a 2,000-pound bomb exploding in Gaza City with the caption “Onwards to victory!,” before deleting with no apology.

In September 2024, four Jewish Chronicle columnists resigned in protest after the paper published a story that included fabricated quotes from Israeli officials, with one declaring that “too often the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic.” Four Israelis, including an aide to Netanyahu, were subsequently arrested on charges of falsifying and distributing fabricated documents to the Jewish Chronicle and Germany’s largest newspaper Bild.

In September, the Muslim Council of Britain wrote a letter expressing concern with Gibb’s position on the editorial standards committee, noting his involvement with the Jewish Chronicle, its political orientation, the fact that it had been repeatedly reported to the Independent Press Standards Organisation. At that May meeting, BBC journalists had emphasized that Gibbs’s agenda was widely understood in British media circles, referring to his links to the Jewish Chronicle and noting its right-wing partisan orientation and slavish pro-Israel stance.

But it was Berg’s key role in shaping online coverage of the Middle East that the staffers emphasized the most at the “listening session” meeting with the BBC director general, Tim Davie, in May. They noted Berg’s history and associations as indicative of bias, pointing to instances where journalists’ copy had been changed prior to publication. They made specific requests: that stories should, as a rule, emphasize that Israel had not granted the BBC access to Gaza, that the network should end the practice of presenting the official Israeli versions of events as fact, and that the BBC should do more to offer context about Israeli occupation and the fact that Gaza is overwhelmingly populated by descendants of refugees forcibly driven from their homes beginning in 1948. While Davie told staff that management would “look into” staff objections, to date no response ever came back.

A crucial part of the BBC news website is its curation department, which selects the stories that are displayed on each section’s “front page,” as well as the overall BBC news homepage. If a story appears on the front page, it often receives hundreds of thousands or even millions of views, BBC staffers said, adding that stories published on regional index pages tend to attract only a fraction of that number. BBC staffers allege that Berg plays a powerful role in deciding which Middle East stories appear on the BBC News front page. The BBC denies that he has a veto, and claims staffers are assigning “outsize importance” to Berg’s influence. Given that only a handful of stories are published to the Middle East index each day, it is relatively easy for a single editor to have an effect while also influencing coverage outside of the index. “If it’s Israel/Palestine, it has to go through Raffi before curation even OK it,” one journalist said. “Anyone who writes on Gaza or Israel is asked: ‘Has it gone to edpol [editorial policy], lawyers, and has it gone to Raffi?’” another said.

In response to BBC management claims that Berg’s power is being exaggerated by staff, a former journalist at the BBC World Service says: “I was working for a World Service department, producing content for language services. ‘We have to run this past Raffi’ was the reflex answer to any producer pitching anything on Israel.” The journalist said that other editors were reluctant to sign off content, treating Berg’s verdict as “their safety step” in the editorial process. “There was an extreme fear at the BBC, that if you ever wanted to do anything about Israel or Palestine, editors would say: ‘If you want to pitch something, you have to go through Raffi and get his signoff.”

This dynamic was corroborated by a third journalist, who said that even if a story which touched on Israel and Palestine appeared on another news index, it would still be flagged for Berg’s attention and approval. “How much power he has is wild,” said the journalist. “His reach goes beyond just the Middle East index, but to adjacent subject matters.”

Raffi Berg on Netanyahu’s Bookshelf

Raffi Berg began his career in local radio, later spending nearly a year as a news editor for the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an outlet he later discovered was run by the CIA—a fact he was “absolutely thrilled” to learn.

Berg’s first job at the BBC was as a reporter. His bylined work included “Israel’s teenage recruits,” a story published in 2002 that presented young IDF soldiers as courageous defenders of their country while failing to mention the occupation and settlement of Palestinian land or the widespread allegations of crimes documented by human rights organizations, including in Israel, and even the U.S. State Department. One BBC journalist described the article as an “IDF puff piece.”

Berg’s reported work also included a three-part series on Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. The series presented them as victims seeking “a better quality of life” and did not mention the fact that the settlements have been repeatedly deemed illegal. Instead, the series included a boxed sidebar, outside the text of the actual story, to relay that the settlements are “widely regarded by international community as illegal under international law,” but Israel maintains that “international conventions do not apply in the West Bank and Gaza because they were not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state in the first place.”

On January 11, 2009, demonstrators held a rally in London’s Trafalgar Square in support of Operation Cast Lead, an Israeli military onslaught against Gaza in which up to 1,400 Palestinians were killed, most of them believed to be civilians. Demonstrators held Israeli flags and placards emblazoned with the words: “END HAMAS TERROR! PEACE FOR THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL AND GAZA.” While the event was billed as supporting “Peace in Israel, Peace in Gaza,” speakers at the rally voiced support for Israel’s military offensive. “In this case, I think there is no such thing as disproportion. If you have got a war to fight, then you fight,” one speaker said.

The BBC coverage of the event proclaimed: “Thousands call for Mid-East peace.” Its story opened with several paragraphs that described the rally as showcasing speeches that characterized the Israeli military offensive as pro-peace and repeated without skepticism the claims of the organizers:

Thousands of pro-Israel supporters have gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to call for an end to the violence in the Middle East.

Organizers said they wanted people in Gaza and Israel to live in peace, but argued that Hamas must accept responsibility for the conflict.

Berg did not write the unbylined piece. But he attended the event “in a personal capacity” prior to becoming the BBC’s “Middle East online editor, or indeed acting editor,” the BBC said. Yet Berg was still a BBC staffer at the time, working on the website’s Middle East desk. In an article in which the BBC omitted key details about the nature of the rally, the organization