SPECIAL REPORT: BBC’s 10 most shocking anti-Israel scandals exposed in damning dossier

This week, The Telegraph reported that Michael Prescott, who until four months ago was an independent advisor to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board, had written a document which he had sent to the BBC’s board, which contains some of its most senior executives. This dossier set out in detail the severe problems with bias present in the UK’s national news broadcaster, an organisation which is publicly dedicated to objectivity.  

On Thursday, The Telegraph published the dossier, in full. It does not focus exclusively on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – other sections include the BBC’s skewed US election coverage, serious misreporting relating to racial diversity and a high level bias on issues relating to biological sex and gender.

However, a significant section of the dossier looks into a series of examples of highly concerning anti-Israel bias by the broadcaster–primarily on the BBC Arabic channel, but with examples also present on the Corporation’s English-language news offerings, including BBC News and Newsnight.

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In Mr Prescott’s view, which may well strike a chord with many in the UK’s Jewish community, “the [BBC’s] executive repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve highlighted problems, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all… On no other occasion in my professional life have I witnessed what I did at the BBC with regard to how management dealt with (or failed to deal with) serious recurrent problems.”

1.    BBC Arabic’s sharply divergent reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared to the BBC’s English language website

In internal BBC report compared five months of coverage (7 May – 6 October 2024) of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between the BBC’s English language website (535 articles) and BBC Arabic (523 articles).

According to the Prescott dossier published by the Telegraph, this exposed “stark differences” between the two. The English language website had posted 19 different stories about hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October 2023 – BBC Arabic had posted none. By contrast, however, all articles critical of Israel posted on the English language website had also been posted on BBC Arabic.

Prescott also said that “the English-language website had three times as many stories that primarily dealt with the suffering of Israelis. These included the horrors faced by hostages held captive in Gaza, how traumatised Israeli communities were coping, Hamas and Hezbollah rocket attacks on residential Israeli communities and growing antisemitism.

These were all missing from BBC Arabic.” He said there had been four articles critical of Hamas on the English language website. None had been put on BBC Arabic.

2.    BBC Arabic’s coverage of the story of the girl enslaved by ISIS and liberated from Gaza

Fawzia Sido was a Yazidi woman who was captured by ISIS in Iraq at the age of 11, and who was “married” – a sex slave – to a Palestinian fighting in Syria, bearing two children before the age of 15. After her “husband” was killed, she was smuggled back to Gaza in 2020, remaining under the control of her “husband’s” family, as well as Hamas. She was liberated by Israeli soldiers.

The BBC News English website covered the story, which, as Prescott said, “detailed her escape and rescue, with backup for her claims from the US State Department and the Iraqi authorities.”

However, as Prescott showed, the BBC Arabic version of the story was markedly different – the headline was “Israel says ‘Yazidi prisoner returned to Iraq after ten years in Gaza,’ Hamas tells BBC ‘Israel narrative is fabricated’”, while “the bulk of BBC Arabic’s story is taken up by a 582-word-long statement by Hamas disputing the woman’s terrible story.”

3.    BBC Arabic’s coverage of the October 2024 Hamas terror attack in Jaffa

On 1 October 2024, two Hamas terrorists killed seven people and injured 17. Prescott refers to “major content and tone differences” between the English language and BBC Arabic stories.

As he sets out, “The BBC News’ English website revealed how the victims included Inbar Segev Vigder, a young mother who died shielding her nine-month-old baby from harm.

“BBC Arabic covered the story under the headline: “The Qassam Brigades claims responsibility for the Jaffa operation, what do we know about it?” The report presented the attack as a military operation and gave no information about the victims.”

4.    BBC Arabic’s coverage of the Majdal Shams attack

In July 2024, Hezbollah bombed a Druze town in the Golan Heights, hitting children who were in the middle of a football match – nine of whom died. Prescott described how the BBC English language coverage and BBC Arabic coverage were “given critically different treatment”.

As he writes, “The English language version included Hezbollah’s denials that it was responsible for the Majdal Shams rocket strike but included evidence to suggest it had bombed other sites in the area.

“The BBC Arabic story, posted four hours after the English language version, did not include evidence linking Hezbollah to the bombing of a nearby military compound, just two miles from the football pitch, and prominently included the terror group’s denials. Its headline referred to ‘Israelis” being killed and injured in the attack, not children.”

Furthermore, Prescott wrote, “a day-two story covered on the Arabic website contained unsubstantiated claims from Iran and Syria that Israel faked the attack as a pretext for attacking Hezbollah.”

5.    The BBC’s Executive’s response to the evidence against BBC Arabic

The BBC’s executive was sent the above findings in January 2025. Prescott mentions that “one very experienced person attending the EGSC [Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee] meeting described the findings as the most ‘extraordinary paper’ she had ever seen. It should have prompted urgent action by the executive but it did not.”

Instead, Prescott says, the deputy head of BBC News, Jonathan Munro, responded to the information by writing that “While no service is perfect and all of us can make mistakes, we believe BBC Arabic delivers against (its) responsibilities with the vast majority of its reporting and analysis”.

Munro said that BBC Arabic’s reporters were an “unrivalled source of knowledge and editorial content for the wider BBC” and the team had delivered “exceptional journalism during this period”.

Prescott goes into considerable detail about how Munro appeared to downplay the findings of the report on BBC Arabic.

The report sent to the BBC executive in January had shown that on BBC Arabic “there were far fewer stories from an Israeli perspective over the five-month review period than from a Palestinian perspective.

“Jonathan’s response was to ignore the review period and find stories outside the scope of the review.”

Prescott went on to say that Munro’s response to BBC Arabic’s reporting of Hamas was to argue that “the high prominence given to Hamas’ lines “helps understanding of what Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza may be hearing”.

6.    BBC Arabic’s use of deeply compromised ‘journalists’ in Gaza was far worse than previously realised

Prescott describes how “media stories about the antisemitic and pro-Hamas views of journalists appearing on BBC Arabic forced another internal review into the channel in June, 2025.”

Such journalists included Samer Elzaenen – revealed by The Telegraph to have posted a number of antisemitic comments, including suggesting Jews should be burned “as Hitler did”.

Another example was Ahmed Qannan, who described a gunman who killed four civilians and an Israeli police officer as a “hero”. A third was Ahmed Alagha, who described Israelis as less than human and Jews as “devils”

Originally it was reported that Elzaenen had featured on BBC Arabic “a dozen times”. Prescott says that the BBC’s internal review showed Elzaenen had actually appeared 244 times on BBC Arabic between 13 November 2023 and 18 April, 2025. Qannan appeared 217 times on the channel between 8 February, 2024 and the 27 April, 2025. Alagha appeared 522 times between 21 November, 2023, and 26 April, 2025.

They were consistently introduced to BBC Arabic audiences as ‘journalists’.

When the BBC responded to criticism of the use of such people, Prescott describes how the corporation “downplayed their contributions to the channel, even claiming they were just ‘eyewitnesses’.

7.    BBC ignored growing concerns about inaccuracy of Gazan death toll reporting

Another review into the BBC coverage of the conflict’s death toll, Prescott says, was reported back to the Corporation’s EGSC in July 2024 – coming after the UN revised its own figures to show that the percentage of women and children killed was lower than had been reported.

Hamas, who reported these figures, based them both on hospital records, but also on “media reports” from the ‘Gaza Government Media Office’ – which is also run by Hamas.

Prescott wrote that Hamas “has never explained how this number has been calculated but the majority of deaths from ‘media reports’ are women and children.”

He said that both the UN and multiple media outlets, including the BBC, had “reported that 70 percent of all those killed in Gaza were women and children…despite growing concerns that this…methodology was unreliable…” He said that the EGSC was told that “for too long the BBC had given ‘unjustifiable weight’ to the 70 percent claim, even though concerns about its credibility were well known.”

8.    The BBC misreported on mass graves in Gaza, implying Israeli war crimes

Prescott describes how in both April and June the BBC reported on stories relating to the discovery of mass graves in Gaza, and that “the strong implication in the coverage was that Israeli forces had buried hundreds of bodies at both sites prior to withdrawing from the area.” However, “the source for both stories was the Hamas-controlled Gaza Civil Defence Agency. This was not reflected in the coverage.”

Prescott confirms that the internal report to the BBC’s EGSC flagged: “There was no independent corroboration of allegations of war crimes, including alleged evidence of summary executions, torture and bodies found with their hands tied together”.

One of the BBC’s online story had actually incorrectly implied a UN official had corroborated the reports of hands being tied.

Prescott says: “It seems that the most likely explanation was the graves at both hospitals were dug by Palestinians and the people buried there had died or been killed prior to the arrival of Israel ground forces.”

Furthermore, he writes, “the EGSC was reminded that the BBC had itself reported extensively on Palestinians digging these graves at the time. These reports had topped its bulletins.

“How could this then be forgotten in the subsequent BBC coverage that suggested something more sinister had occurred? The EGSC was offered no explanation.

“The question becomes even more pressing when you learn the journalists responsible for the first set of stories were the same journalists who wrote the second set of stories suggesting the graves were evidence of Israeli war crimes.

“Executives were presented with the evidence about how badly the BBC had got this wrong but it remains unclear what measures were taken regarding personnel or training.”

9.    The BBC knew a devastating claim about Gaza starvation was incorrect. They asked an Israeli representative on Newsnight about it anyway.

In May 2025 in a now notorious incident, the UN’s Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Tom Fletcher, publicly claimed that 14,000 babies in Gaza were at risk of starving to death within the next 48 hours if Israel did not lift an aid blockade. The story gained worldwide attention.

Interestingly, it was the BBC itself which found the major discrepancy in what Fletcher had said, and the truth. Fletcher had cited an IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) report – but what the report had actually said was that 14,000 children were at risk of acute malnutrition over the course of a year if the blockade was not lifted.

The BBC, as Prescott says, “updated its online articles accordingly”. Yet, he writes, “despite this, Fletcher’s inaccurate claim was put to Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon on Newsnight. Why, when the BBC knew the suggestion was wrong?”

In that same programme, Prescott sets out, images of a baby, Siwar Ashour, were featured. Ashour suffered from allergies and a congenital condition – and required specialist formula.

“By the time of broadcast, the BBC already knew the story was out of date and that baby Siwar had received the necessary formula a week earlier, she was maintaining weight and had been discharged from hospital”, Prescott writes.

“None of that was revealed in the programme – meaning the BBC had broadcast another inaccurate story.”

Prescott also makes clear that “this was not the first or last time the BBC has reported stories about starvation in Gaza without telling audiences that the person highlighted has pre-existing medical conditions that might explain their emaciated appearance.”

He cited a case from August 2025, when a BBC headline informed readers that a ‘Malnutritioned Gaza woman flown to Italy dies in hospital’. This version, he described, was “shared around the world”. Only two days later was the headline updated to ‘Gaza woman flown to Italy dies in hospital’, it having become clear that “she had serious pre-existing conditions”.

10. The ICJ did not rule that there was a “plausible case of genocide” in Gaza. The BBC suggested that it had – too many times to count

It was in a BBC Hardtalk interview that that ICJ’s former president, Joan Donoghue – who was on the panel which considered South Africa’s submission against Israel to the court – clarified that it was not correct to say the ICJ had ruled there was a “plausible case of genocide” in Gaza.

A report to the BBC’s EGSC, however, flagged “numerous instances” where the Corporation had suggested exactly that, Prescott said, describing it “being used on BBC reports, analysis and live two-ways on both television and radio. It was also cited by international editor Jeremy Bowen and on Newsnight.”

He described how the report to the EGSC said “there were too many instances of the BBC misrepresenting the ICJ’s ruling to be listed in full.”

Prescott pointed out that “the ICJ report runs to just 26 pages and was written in non-technical language. Had no BBC reporter troubled themselves to read it?”

He said the internal BBC review had concluded that the ICJ report “is very clear and explicitly states that the court is not making any determination on the merits of South Africa’s case. The ICJ said it was only assessing whether what South Africa had alleged was potentially covered by the genocide convention.”

“The BBC needs to accept it has systemic issues with the coverage”

In what can best be described as an utterly damning ending to this section of his dossier, Prescott concludes that “the BBC is prone to downplaying criticism by saying it receives similar numbers of complaints from both sides. Looking at the evidence set out above, it seems very hard for any pro-Palestinian observers to make a compelling case the BBC has a pro-Israel bias.

“Claims against Israel seem to be raced to air or online without adequate checks, evidencing either carelessness or a desire always to believe the worst about Israel. The errors come thick and fast, sometimes with ‘eyewitness’ testimony from locals who have tweeted in praise of the 7 October killings and worse.

“The BBC needs to accept it has systemic issues with the coverage. Only then can the process properly begin to fix the problem.”