Burying Genocide: The BBC, Gaza and the Role of the UK

EUROPE, 14 Jul 2025

Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service

Keir Starmer onboard a Royal Air Force plane.
Photo: Stefan Rousseau.

14 Jul 2025 – One might naively think that a national public-service broadcaster would inform the public about matters of national interest. Surely no reasonable person would deny that the public has a right to know what the government is doing in our name. But, over and above this basic requirement, a responsible public-service broadcaster should also scrutinise the government’s actions and statements, and challenge them robustly.

Instead, as Declassified UK has reported, Britain’s ‘obedient’ defence correspondents, including BBC journalists, are covering up British spy flights for Israel. The RAF has carried out more than 500 surveillance flights over Gaza since December 2023. The Ministry of Defence insists that the flights, undertaken by aircraft based at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, are solely to assist in providing information about Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October 2023. But the British ‘mainstream’ media – which largely serves state-corporate interests, not the public interest – have not carried out a single investigation into the extent, impact or legal status of these flights.

Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), a London-based charity that records, investigates and disseminates evidence of armed violence against civilians worldwide, has analysed flight-tracking data over or close to Gaza. They found that between 3 December 2023 and 27 March 2025, the RAF carried out at least 518 Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) flights in or near Gaza’s airspace.

AOAV found that the RAF conducted 24 flights in the two weeks leading up to and including the day of Israel’s deadly attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp on 8 June 2024, which reportedly killed 274 Palestinians and injured over 700. Four Israeli hostages were rescued in the operation.

Iain Overton, the Executive Director of AOAV, noted that:

‘This is not the only instance where UK ISR flights have coincided with major Israeli military assaults. In the two weeks leading up to Israel’s attack on Rafah on 12 February 2024, which killed at least 67 Palestinians, the RAF flew 15 ISR missions over Gaza. Flights continued even during the so-called “limited ceasefire” in early 2025, with six flights recorded in February alone.’

He added:

‘With no parliamentary oversight or public scrutiny, it remains unclear how much British intelligence gathered from these flights has been shared with Israel.’

This is surely a significant question that responsible journalists should be raising; particularly, the national broadcaster. But, as Declassified UK has observed, the BBC has essentially remained ‘silent’ on whether these flights are contributing to the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocide and war crimes in Gaza.

In an article jointly published by Declassified UK and The National newspaper in Scotland, Des Freedman, Professor of Media & Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, wrote:

‘thanks to dogged work by campaigners, independent journalists and pro-Palestine MPs, we know both that the flights are continuing to operate (as they did even throughout the ceasefire) and that spikes in the number of flights have coincided with especially deadly Israeli attacks on Gaza.

‘The lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream media is perhaps not surprising but it is deeply troubling.’

He added:

‘It’s hard to reconcile this silence with the energy with which mainstream media have investigated Russian spy planes flying over Ukraine and other military manoeuvres related to Putin’s invasion.’

On 7 July, we challenged Jonathan Beale, the BBC’s defence correspondent via X, linking to Freedman’s article:

‘Hello @bealejonathan,

‘As @BBCNews defence correspondent, why are you covering up British spy flights for Israel?’

Beale was clearly irked and posted this reply:

‘Why are you claiming “cover-up” – without a shred of evidence of what’s supposed to have been covered up? I’m curious as to how a media lecturer at Goldsmiths seems to have knowledge of “intelligence” that no other journalist has seen?’

A few minutes later, having now been alerted to the Declassified UK article, he confronted Freedman:

‘Please tell us Des as to how we can get the classified intelligence only you seem to know about. Why teach media studies when you can clearly scoop us all?’

Freedman responded reasonably:

‘As you know Jonathan, I don’t have access to classified files but to open news databases. Is any of the story incorrect? Instead of a snippy response, surely it would be better to use your contacts to investigate a story that’s in the public interest?’

As Declassified UK said in a follow-up post on X:

‘In a bizarre admission he [Beale] suggests that open source information on military flights is “classified”, raising the question – how do BBC journalists investigate the British military?’

The answer, of course, is that BBC journalists, along with other state stenographers, have learned not to investigate too deeply if they are to retain their privileged position.

When Declassified UK challenged Richard Burgess, the BBC’s director of news content, he gave this response befitting a senior news apparatchik:

‘I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel.’

Why did Burgess say, ‘in Israel’? Did he just erase Palestine? Is he actually unaware that Gaza is an occupied Palestinian territory?

As if that was not already a bizarre and misleading form of words, consider this. Nobody is asking the BBC to ‘overplay’ what the UK is doing; but simply to report it, rather than bury it to the point of invisibility. Whitewashing genocide as ‘what’s happening in Israel’ is wretched BBC newspeak.

Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour party leader, has called for a public inquiry to determine what the UK government is hiding about its role in Israel’s genocide, including RAF flights from Cyprus. In an article for the Morning Star, he wrote:

‘We have also repeatedly asked for the truth regarding the role of British military bases in Cyprus, concerning the transfer of arms and the supply of military intelligence.

‘When the Prime Minister visited RAF Akrotiri in December 2024, he was filmed telling troops: “The whole world and everyone back at home is relying on you.” He added: “Quite a bit of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all of the time. We can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing.” What does the government have to hide?’

Corbyn continued:

‘Over the past 18 months, our questions have been met with evasion, obstruction and silence, leaving the public in the dark over the ways in which the responsibilities of government have been discharged. Transparency and accountability are cornerstones of democracy. The British public deserves to know the full scale of Britain’s complicity in crimes against humanity.’

And the British public-service broadcaster, along with the UK’s other major news outlets, should have been reporting this since October 2023. As Mark Curtis, co-director of Declassified UK, commented:

‘Britain’s national media are doing a wonderful job covering up the extent of British support for Israel during a genocide. It’s their most impressive performance since destroying the prospects of a decent government under Jeremy Corbyn in 2015-19.’

A Devastating Indictment of BBC ‘Impartiality’

The BBC’s Richard Burgess, quoted above, was speaking in parliament at the launch of a study by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) into the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Gaza. The report examined BBC content from 7 October 2023 to 7 October 2024. A total of 3,873 BBC articles and 32,092 segments broadcast on BBC television and radio were analysed.

CfMM’s key findings were:

• Palestinian deaths treated as less newsworthy: Despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel, BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality and ran almost equal numbers of humanising victim profiles (279 Palestinians vs 201 Israelis).
• Systematic language bias favouring Israelis: BBC used emotive terms four times more for Israeli victims, applied ‘massacre’ 18 times more to Israeli casualties, and used ‘murder’ 220 times for Israelis versus once for Palestinians.
• Suppression of genocide allegations: BBC presenters shut down genocide claims in over 100 documented instances whilst making zero mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements, including Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek reference (see below).
• Muffling Palestinian voices: The BBC interviewed significantly fewer Palestinians than Israelis (1,085 v 2,350) on television and radio, while BBC presenters shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian perspective (2,340 v 217).

These findings show that the BBC values the lives of Israelis much more than the lives of Palestinians. This is part of a bigger picture of BBC News coverage conforming to the Israeli narrative, a key feature of BBC journalism going back decades. The CfMM report is a devastating indictment of the BBC’s endlessly repeated, robotic claim of ‘impartiality’.

At the parliamentary launch of the CfMM report, Burgess was also challenged by Peter Oborne, the former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph. The exchange was filmed by someone at the meeting. Oborne robustly confronted Burgess with as many as six ways in which BBC News has misled its audiences. Independent journalist Jonathan Cook helpfully detailed these six points, while providing crucial context, which can be summarised as follows:

1. The BBC has never mentioned the Hannibal directive, implemented by Israel on 7 October 2023, that permitted the Israeli killing of Israeli civilians, often by Apache helicopter fire, to prevent them being taken captive by Hamas. See our media alert about this from February 2025.

2. The BBC has never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine which underlies Israel’s murderous ‘mowing the lawn’ Gaza strategy over the past two decades: repeated devastating assaults on the Palestinians in Gaza to weaken their resistance to the brutal and illegal Israeli occupation, and to make it easier to ethnically cleanse them.

3. The BBC has not reported the many dozens of genocidal statements from Israeli officials since 7 October. In particular, the BBC buried Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblically-inspired comparison of the Palestinians to ‘Amalek’ – a people the Jews were instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth.

4. By contrast, as reported in the CfMM study, on more than 100 occasions when guests have tried to refer to what is happening in Gaza as genocide, BBC staff have immediately shut them down on air.

5. The BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

6. Finally, Oborne observed that the distinguished Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who lives in the UK and teaches at Oxford University, has never been invited to appear by the BBC.

Cook noted:

‘Unlike the Israeli spokespeople familiar to BBC audiences, who are paid to muddy the waters and deny Israel’s genocide, Shlaim is both knowledgeable about the history of Israeli colonisation of Palestine and truly independent. […] His research has led him to a series of highly critical conclusions about Israel’s historical and current treatment of the Palestinians. He calls what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide.’

Cook added:

‘He is one of the prominent Israelis we are never allowed to hear from, because they are likely to make more credible and mainstream a narrative the BBC wishes to present as fringe, loopy and antisemitic. Again, what the BBC is doing – paid for by British taxpayers – isn’t journalism. It is propaganda for a foreign state.’

The BBC Is Being Lead by a ‘PR Person’

When the BBC dropped the powerful documentary, ‘Gaza: Doctors Under Attack’, it compounded its complicity in Israel’s genocide. The Corporation’s earlier withdrawal of ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’, had already epitomised how much the UK’s national broadcaster is beholden to the Israel lobby (see our media alert here).

‘Gaza: Doctors Under Attack’ details how Israel has systematically targeted hospitals, health care centres, medics themselves and even their families. Doctors told the filmmakers of how they had been detained, beaten and tortured by the Israelis, confirmed by an anonymous Israeli whistleblower. The nonsensical reason given by the BBC for cancelling the film, which it had itself commissioned from Basement Films, was the risk that broadcasting it would create ‘a perception of partiality’. Reporting the truth about Israel’s crimes would be ‘partial’? Such inversion of reality has become standard for the national broadcaster.

The film was instead shown by Channel 4 on 2 July. After watching it, Gary Lineker, who had essentially been pushed out of the BBC for his honesty on Gaza and other issues, said that, ‘The BBC should hang its head in shame.’

Yanis Varoufakis, the economist and former Greek finance minister, said:

‘I can’t see how the BBC will ever recover from its headlong leap into this ethical void, all in the name of not upsetting the perpetrators of the most horrific genocide since the end of the 2nd World War.’

Ben de Pear, the documentary’s executive producer for Basement Films and a former Channel 4 News editor, accused the BBC of trying to gag him and others over its decision not to show the documentary. In a statement that he posted to LinkedIn, de Pear said the film had passed through many ‘BBC compliance hoops’ and that the BBC were now attempting to stop him talking about the film’s ‘painful journey’ to the screen:

‘I rejected and refused to sign the double gagging clause the BBC bosses tried multiple times to get me to sign. Not only could we have been sued for saying the BBC refused to air the film (palpably and provably true) but also if any other company had said it, the BBC could sue us.

‘Not only could we not tell the truth that was already stated, but neither could others. Reader, I didn’t sign it.’

At a conference in Sheffield, de Pear criticised Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, over the BBC’s decision to drop the film:

‘All the decisions about our film were not taken by journalists, they were taken by Tim Davie. He is just a PR person. Tim Davie is taking editorial decisions which, frankly, he is not capable of making.’

De Pear added:

‘The BBC’s primary purpose is TV news and current affairs, and if it’s failing on that it doesn’t matter what drama it makes or sports it covers. It is failing as an institution. And if it’s failing on that then it needs new management.’

Of course, as Media Lens has long argued and demonstrated with copious examples since our inception in 2001, the BBC isn’t ‘failing’. It is doing precisely what it was set up to do: namely act as a mouthpiece for establishment power and as an enabler of state crimes.

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Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. In 2007, Media Lens was awarded the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Prize. We have written three co-authored books: Guardians of Power-The Myth of the Liberal Media (Pluto Press, 2006), Newspeak-In the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2009), and Propaganda Blitz (Pluto Press, 2018). Contacts: David Edwards: editor@medialens.org – David Cromwell: editor@medialens.org

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