A letter to the BBC on its coverage of Palestine

The BBC’s current coverage of what is happening in Gaza is unacceptable. Headlines such as yesterday’s ‘Rockets hit Israel after militants killed’ are deeply misleading, and serve to perpetuate this decades-long reality of occupation and oppression. At the time your article was published, there had been 69 Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza — including 8 women and 17 children.

BBC news headline, Thursday May 13th, 2021.

The Gaza Strip is an area of 365 square km and home to around 2 million Palestinians, most of whom are refugees from 1948, whose homes remain inside what is now the State of Israel. The area has been under siege since 2007, making its population effectively captive. There is, quite literally, nowhere for people to hide.

Videos all over social media show terrified families huddling in their homes, huge blasts as residential buildings are turned to dust, and children mourning their dead parents. During a BBC World Service interview with Fadi Abu Shammalah, a resident of Gaza, we heard airstrikes hit close to his home and him having to comfort his terrified child live on air — only seconds after a question from the BBC interviewer which implicitly blamed rocket fire from Gaza for this airstrike, which is both factually incorrect and fully divorced from the wider context of the forced expulsions and attacks on worshippers in Jerusalem.

Six-year old Suzy Eshkuntana is rescued from the rubble after an airstrike hits her home. He mother and all four siblings were killed during the attack. Photo credit: The Guardian, Monday 17th May.

The lack of context for why Gaza is being targeted and the false narrative of ‘two sides in conflict’, rather than that of a military power seeking to subjugate an occupied indigenous people — to which decades of international resolutions, empirical studies, and lived experience have testified — is quite simply astounding.

As a publicly funded body you have a responsibility to your citizens, and as journalists and human beings you have an ethical responsibility to report on the reality faithfully. The longer this type of framing and narrative continues, the further we remain from freedom, justice, and equality for all.

Note: The current death toll now stands at 197 dead, including 58 children. 1235 are injured. (Current as of 17/05/21)