Adam LeBor
The Free Press, Feb. 24, 2025
“BBC bosses absolutely know that there is a systemic problem of bias at BBC Arabic, but the fact that they have not admitted it is just pure gaslighting of the Jewish community.”
Abdullah Al-Yazouri, a 13-year-old boy living in the Gaza Strip, is a natural in front of the camera. In the BBC documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which first aired February 17, he and other youngsters guide viewers through wrecked buildings, rubble-strewn streets, and bloody, overflowing hospitals.
The film, which the network’s website proudly billed as a report on “four young people trying to survive the Israel-Hamas war as they hope for a ceasefire,” offers “a vivid and unflinching view of life in a warzone.” There are moments of levity, befitting a doc narrated by kids: We meet Renad, 10, who runs an online cooking channel on TikTok, conjuring up delicious dishes from whatever she and her sister can gather. Elsewhere, Rana, a young woman, has given birth prematurely to a baby girl.
For the most part, though, the film is grim—and some of the footage is disturbing. A surgeon tries to save the injured arm of a child on the operating table. Soon after, he passes the bloody, amputated limb to a colleague.
The message could not be clearer: Such is the horror inflicted by the Yehud—the Arabic word for Jew, which is spoken by Palestinians in the film, but sanitized in the BBC’s translation as Israeli, per the network’s long-standing practice.
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