BBC Verify has become a tool for promoting anti-israel bias

Last year, the BBC announced a major new journalistic initiative with much fanfare. BBC News CEO Deborah Turness said that BBC Verify would “pull back the curtain” on the work of the organisation, producing “radical transparency”.

Unfortunately, the curtain being pulled back on BBC Verify itself only serves to highlight the consistent and consequential failures of the BBC’S reporting on the Israel-hamas war.

I first noticed BBC Verify shortly after the terrorist massacre of October 7. A few weeks into the war I wrote in these pages about the BBC’S diplomatic correspondent, Caroline Hawley. This senior journalist’s Twitter feed read like a series of press releases from Hamas, with Hawley reposting propaganda from Gaza without context or any apparent attempt at basic journalistic verification.

Shortly afterwards, Hawley was chosen to present a BBC Verify report on the very conflict she had just been exposed as demonstrating a lack of impartiality on. This smacked of a management showing stubborn disregard for compelling evidence of journalistic bias. To make matters worse, Hawley did not refer to Hamas as a proscribed terrorist organisation in her report.

It was claimed by staffers that BBC Verify would be a “new team of investigative journalists with years of experience in verification work and forensic journalism”. The reality appears to be that this new brand is instead a major contributor to the damage being done to the BBC’S reputation and its commitments to impartiality and accuracy. The most recent example of this is perhaps the most damning.

Last week the BBC published a Verify-branded report on the tragic circumstances that surrounded the deaths of Palestinians at an aid convoy in Gaza. The reporting was based partially on the account of Mahmoud Awadeyah, described by the BBC as a “journalist”.

Thanks to the work of researcher David Collier, we know a lot more about the source that the BBC relied on for its supposedly forensic reporting. Awadeyah reportedly works for the Tasnim News Agency, which is associated with Iranian Revolutionary Guard. In other words, it appears that the BBC’S source is on the payroll of a country committed to the genocidal destruction of the Jewish State, one that uses its media proxies to promote its murderous ambitions.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Mahmoud Awadeyah’s social-media timeline is filled with pro-terrorist and antisemitic material. BBC Verify’s source appears to be a man who celebrates the deaths of Jews. Last year, as seven lay dead after a terror attack on a synagogue in East Jerusalem, Awadeyah took to Facebook to describe his feelings: “A state of rejoicing, exuberance and mosques filled with exuberance. Revenge for the fetus”. And this apparent glee at the violent deaths of Jewish people was not an isolated occurrence.

In the summer of 2023, he posed in front of a mural depicting what seemed to be an Islamic Jihad rocket strike on an Israeli apartment building. Eighty year-old Inga Avramayan, who had been trying to assist her paralysed husband to a shelter, was killed in that attack. Yet as well as posing in front of the mural, Awadeyah promised more, writing: “Always rest assured that what is coming is more beautiful. God willing”.

Awadeyah’s social-media posts are publicly available for any journalist to see. Yet BBC Verify appears to have failed in the most basic of journalistic practices: checking one of their key sources. How could this have possibly happened?

The BBC has developed an apparent habit of accepting at face value what it is told by people presenting as Palestinian civilians or civic officials. It either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that in too many cases these people turn out to be representatives of, or sympathetic towards, terrorist organisations.

It also appears to be increasingly the case that stories BBC reporters receive from Palestinian sources align with their negative assumptions about Israel, and that the corporation’s journalists don’t challenge or robustly investigate accounts that come from highly flawed and disreputable sources.

The failure of BBC Verify’s reporting on such a highprofile and emotive conflict is not just a profound journalistic failure. The stakes are regrettably much higher than that.

The BBC’S reporting is contributing to an atmosphere in the UK in which Jewish people feel unsafe, its flawed journalism adding fuel to the fire of anti-semitism that is glowing ever more dangerously.

It is hard to think of a more damning indictment of the BBC. And yet, nothing changes. Senior BBC managers send emails about their commitment to fighting anti-semitism, but words are meaningless to the Jewish community. Only actions matter, and the consistent anti-israel bias of the BBC is a real and present danger to Jewish people.

It is time that the BBC’S senior leadership took accountability for this disastrous state of affairs.