BBC forced to correct two Gaza stories a week

The BBC has been forced to correct two stories a week about the Gaza conflict since the Oct 7 attacks on Israel, The Telegraph can reveal.

BBC Arabic has had to make 215 corrections and clarifications over the past two years on stories that were found to be biased, inaccurate or misleading.

The figures follow a week of revelations by The Telegraph of one-sided reporting at the BBC, disclosed in an 8,000-word dossier compiled by a whistleblower, which also accused BBC Arabic of choosing to “minimise Israeli suffering” in the war in Gaza to “paint Israel as the aggressor”.

On Monday, the BBC is also expected to apologise for the misleading editing of a Donald Trump speech in a Panorama documentary, putting further pressure on Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, to quit.

The media bias campaign group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera) obtained the corrections after more than 100 of its complaints over BBC Arabic’s coverage were upheld. They work out as an average of two stories a week.

One of its complaints involved a BBC Arabic report in January this year about the treatment of hostages by the Al-Qassam Brigade, in which the Hamas unit was described as “guarding” the hostages and being “responsible for securing the hostages”, rather than holding them captive.

BBC Arabic – which is part of the World Service and is funded mainly through the licence fee – has also been forced to make more than 40 corrections after Camera complained about stories that incorrectly referred to communities inside Israel’s internationally recognised territory as “settlements” and their residents as “settlers”.

Responding to the figures, Baroness Deech, a former BBC governor, said the broadcaster’s own Executive Complaint Unit (ECU) has failed in its obligation as an internal standards watchdog.

She said: “While BBC Arabic rightly continues to receive condemnation from politicians from all sides of the House for its repeated breaches of BBC guidelines and its flagrant anti-Israel bias, the BBC’s ECU considers it to be entirely blameless.

“The ECU is turning a blind eye to bias within BBC Arabic. We need an independent complaints process because the BBC simply cannot be trusted to mark its own homework.”

Michael Prescott, who until June was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC), was so appalled by the corporation’s lack of action over numerous instances of bias that he sent a memo to all BBC board members, which is now circulating in government departments.

In a copy of the letter, which was last week published by The Telegraph, he said that BBC Arabic gave a platform to journalists who had made extreme anti-Semitic comments.

Among the examples of bias highlighted by both Camera and Mr Prescott were the differences in stories about an attack by Hamas on Oct 1 2024 that killed seven Israeli civilians in Jaffa.

While the BBC News English version reported how the civilians were killed on a train and railway platform, the BBC Arabic version presented the attack as a military operation with no mention of the civilian victims.

Another BBC Arabic report in January this year described the Al-Qassam Brigade as “guarding” the hostages and as being “responsible for securing the hostages”, rather than holding them captive.

It also featured two female Israeli hostages “thanking” their captors for the “good treatment” they received while “in custody”.