Key takeaways:
- A leaked report provides definitive proof that there is an anti-Israel bias problem at both BBC Arabic and BBC News, marring its coverage of Israel and its war against Hamas.
- This problem has been ignored and downplayed by top leadership seeking to protect the BBC’s image, allowing it to fester and grow within the broadcasting organization.
- Will the scandal surrounding this report finally lead to a change in leadership or will the broadcaster continue to tolerate this culture of anti-Israel bias?
This has not been a good week for the BBC.
On Monday, November 3, The Telegraph published a scoop that, according to a leaked internal report, the British Broadcaster’s Panorama program edited a video from the January 6 riots to make it appear as if US President Donald Trump had incited violence.
Then, the next day, The Telegraph published another bombshell from the same leaked report: anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s coverage of the war in Gaza is endemic, with managers either ignoring or refusing to rectify this deeply ingrained breach of journalistic standards.
For those of us who have kept a close eye on the BBC’s coverage from even before the October 7 attacks, this was not a surprise but a confirmation: The anti-Israel bias in BBC reports is not coincidental but central to its content.
🚨 BREAKING: Leaked BBC report admits editors pushed Hamas propaganda.
BBC News & Arabic service “minimised Israeli suffering,” “painted Israel as the aggressor,” and aired Hamas claims without checks.
Proof: BBC bias wasn’t a mistake – it was policy.https://t.co/J9LuZXiAmG
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 4, 2025
The report, which was composed by Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, reveals widespread anti-Israel bias at both BBC Arabic and BBC News.
When it comes to BBC Arabic, a partially government-funded department that is supposed to counter misinformation in the Arabic-speaking world, the Prescott Report pointed to numerous instances of journalistic malfeasance, including:
- Platforming journalists who had made antisemitic comments;
- Spreading Hamas and Hezbollah propaganda as legitimate news sources;
- Translating BBC News articles that were critical of Israel into Arabic but not translating a single article on the Israeli hostages or those that were critical of Hamas;
- Portraying a Hamas terrorist attack in Jaffa as a military operation.
In effect, instead of providing its audience with quality and objective coverage of Israel, BBC Arabic resorted to platforming those who called for Jews to be “burned” and serving as a mouthpiece for organizations that are designated as terror groups by the United Kingdom.
Instead of serving as a tool to fight disinformation, BBC Arabic became a source of disinformation.
And what about BBC Arabic?
Well, they’re one of the most biased outlets covering the Israel-Hamas conflict. pic.twitter.com/4YVS9K4KbJ— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 12, 2024
The Prescott Report’s investigation of BBC News was not that better.
The report noted numerous instances where BBC News gave too much credence to Hamas propaganda, was slow to rectify misinformation, and intentionally spread falsehoods. Some examples of this included:
- Continuing to uncritically parrot the claim that 70 percent of victims were Gaza were women and children, even though growing evidence pointed to the questionability of this statistic;
- The BBC had to pull a documentary about children in Gaza after it was discovered that the main narrator was the son of a Hamas minister.
- Spreading the baseless claim that some Palestinians buried in mass graves found outside Gaza hospitals had had their hands bound and were killed execution-style. Despite there being no evidence for this Hamas-created claim, it was still aired by BBC News.
- After UN rights chief Tom Fletcher made the absurd claim that 14,000 children would die within 48 hours if aid could not get to them, it was quickly refuted by none other than the BBC. However, this did not stop a BBC News anchor from putting the allegation to Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon.
- A letter by 600 lawyers claiming that it was illegal to ship arms to Israel got widespread publicity. A 1,000-lawyer letter that argued the opposite received remarkably less attention.
- The BBC repeatedly claimed that the International Court of Justice had found a plausible case of genocide in Gaza. Even though the Court’s former president, Joan Donoghue, explained on a BBC program that this was a misinterpretation of the Court’s decision, it still took months for BBC News to publish a clarification.
At HonestReporting, none of this came as a surprise to us. Even before the war in Gaza, we had been tracking the anti-Israel animus that has infected all strata of the public British broadcaster, from freelancers to top managers.
Other examples of this anti-Israel bias that we have covered include:
- The broadcaster’s refusal to refer to Hamas as “terrorists” even though the entire group has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United Kingdom since 2021.
- The broadcasting of the false claim that an Israeli airstrike on Al-Ahli Hospital had killed 500 people. BBC correspondent Jon Donnison was certain that this had been an Israeli strike, even though, hours later, it was proven to have been a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket and the original death toll provided had been wildly overinflated.
- In a July 2023 interview with former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, BBC anchor Anjana Gadgil unabashedly claimed that the IDF was “happy to kill children”;
- The BBC turned a blind eye to its highest-paid star, Gary Lineker, breaching guidelines by allowing him to share anti-Israel and antisemitic content online with only minimal objections from the British broadcaster.
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Is anyone really shocked that the endemic rot at the heart of @BBCNews is making headlines?The BBC has been caught out on so many occasions, but its leadership has refused to acknowledge the obvious.
Here are just some of the receipts. 🧵 https://t.co/ty5taDqHxR
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 5, 2025
The most disturbing aspect of the leaked Prescott Report and The Telegraph’s coverage is not the blatant anti-Israel bias that has taken root in the British broadcaster’s newsroom. It is the indifference or encouragement of upper management to what are continuous breaches of journalistic standards.
When it comes to BBC Arabic, the report notes that for years, managers had brushed off criticism of its programming.
In an absurd example of how far removed BBC executives are from reality, Jonathan Munro, the senior controller of BBC News content, dismissed claims of bias made against the broadcaster in an earlier investigation, claiming that it published “exceptional journalism” and viewed it as a positive that BBC Arabic was almost as popular as Al Jazeera.
With the Qatari state broadcaster seen as a benchmark of Arabic-language news, it is no surprise that BBC Arabic has sunk to such lows.
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The management at BBC News is not better. The report accuses the British broadcaster of seeking to dismiss complaints against its coverage and of attempting to protect its image rather than rectifying serious breaches.
As former Director of BBC Television, Danny Cohen, wrote in an op-ed covering this latest scandal, the anti-Israel rot in the BBC reaches all the way to “Director General Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness, whose consistent modus operandi against all criticism appears to be to deny, defend and deflect.”
For months, HonestReporting has been showcasing the negligent management of BBC News by Tim Davie and Deborah Turness that has allowed vile anti-Israel bias to fester throughout its coverage.
Will this leaked report finally force the British broadcaster to come to terms with its blatantly biased reporting, or will it continue to circle the wagons and ignore the anti-Israel morass that is slowly destroying its journalistic reputation?
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