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Exposed: Leaked Report Reveals the Anti-Israel Bias Rotting the BBC From Within
The BBC logo is seen at the entrance at Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters in central London. Photo by Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The BBC has once again been exposed for its virulent anti-Israel bias.
On Monday, November 3, The Telegraph published a scoop that, according to a leaked internal report, the British Broadcaster’s Panorama program edited a video from the January 6 riots to make it appear as if US President Donald Trump had incited violence.
Then, the next day, The Telegraph published another bombshell from the same leaked report: anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s coverage of the war in Gaza is endemic, with managers either ignoring or refusing to rectify this deeply ingrained breach of journalistic standards.
For those of us who have kept a close eye on the BBC’s coverage from even before the October 7 attacks, this was not a surprise but a confirmation: The anti-Israel bias in BBC reports is not coincidental, but central to its content.
BREAKING: Leaked BBC report admits editors pushed Hamas propaganda.
BBC News & Arabic service “minimised Israeli suffering,” “painted Israel as the aggressor,” and aired Hamas claims without checks.
Proof: BBC bias wasn’t a mistake – it was policy.https://t.co/J9LuZXiAmG
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 4, 2025
The report, which was composed by Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, reveals widespread anti-Israel bias at both BBC Arabic and BBC News.
When it comes to BBC Arabic, a partially government-funded department that is supposed to counter misinformation in the Arabic-speaking world, the Prescott Report pointed to numerous instances of journalistic malfeasance, including:
- Platforming journalists who had made antisemitic comments;
- Spreading Hamas and Hezbollah propaganda as legitimate news sources;
- Translating BBC News articles that were critical of Israel into Arabic but not translating a single article on the Israeli hostages or those that were critical of Hamas;
- Portraying a Hamas terrorist attack in Jaffa as a military operation.
In effect, instead of providing its audience with quality and objective coverage of Israel, BBC Arabic resorted to platforming those who called for Jews to be “burned” and serving as a mouthpiece for organizations that are designated as terror groups by the United Kingdom.
Instead of serving as a tool to fight disinformation, BBC Arabic became a source of disinformation.
And what about BBC Arabic?
Well, they’re one of the most biased outlets covering the Israel-Hamas conflict. pic.twitter.com/4YVS9K4KbJ— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 12, 2024
The Prescott Report’s investigation of BBC News was not that better.
The report noted numerous instances where BBC News gave too much credence to Hamas propaganda, was slow to rectify misinformation, and intentionally spread falsehoods.
Some examples of this included:
- Continuing to uncritically parrot the claim that 70 percent of victims were Gaza were women and children, even though growing evidence pointed to the questionability of this statistic;
- The BBC had to pull a documentary about children in Gaza after it was discovered that the main narrator was the son of a Hamas minister.
- Spreading the baseless claim that some Palestinians buried in mass graves found outside Gaza hospitals had had their hands bound and were killed execution-style. Despite there being no evidence for this Hamas-created claim, it was still aired by BBC News.
- After UN rights chief Tom Fletcher made the absurd claim that 14,000 children would die within 48 hours if aid could not get to them, it was quickly refuted by none other than the BBC. However, this did not stop a BBC News anchor from putting the allegation to Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon.
- A letter by 600 lawyers claiming that it was illegal to ship arms to Israel got widespread publicity. A 1,000-lawyer letter that argued the opposite received remarkably less attention.
- The BBC repeatedly claimed that the International Court of Justice had found a plausible case of genocide in Gaza. Even though the Court’s former president, Joan Donoghue, explained on a BBC program that this was a misinterpretation of the Court’s decision, it still took months for BBC News to publish a clarification.
At HonestReporting, none of this came as a surprise to us. Even before the war in Gaza, we had been tracking the anti-Israel animus that has infected all strata of the public British broadcaster, from freelancers to top managers.
Other examples of this anti-Israel bias that we have covered include:
- The broadcaster’s refusal to refer to Hamas as “terrorists” even though the entire group has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United Kingdom since 2021.
- The broadcasting of the false claim that an Israeli airstrike on Al-Ahli Hospital had killed 500 people. BBC correspondent Jon Donnison was certain that this had been an Israeli strike, even though, hours later, it was proven to have been a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket and the original death toll provided had been wildly overinflated.
- In a July 2023 interview with former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, BBC anchor Anjana Gadgil unabashedly claimed that the IDF was “happy to kill children”;
- The BBC turned a blind eye to its highest-paid star, Gary Lineker, breaching guidelines by allowing him to share anti-Israel and antisemitic content online with only minimal objections from the British broadcaster.
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Is anyone really shocked that the endemic rot at the heart of @BBCNews is making headlines?The BBC has been caught out on so many occasions, but its leadership has refused to acknowledge the obvious.
Here are just some of the receipts.
https://t.co/ty5taDqHxR
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 5, 2025
The most disturbing aspect of the leaked Prescott Report and The Telegraph’s coverage is not the blatant anti-Israel bias that has taken root in the British broadcaster’s newsroom. It is the indifference or encouragement of upper management to what are continuous breaches of journalistic standards.
When it comes to BBC Arabic, the report notes that for years, managers had brushed off criticism of its programming.
In an absurd example of how far removed BBC executives are from reality, Jonathan Munro, the senior controller of BBC News content, dismissed claims of bias made against the broadcaster in an earlier investigation, claiming that it published “exceptional journalism” and viewed it as a positive that BBC Arabic was almost as popular as Al Jazeera.
With the Qatari state broadcaster seen as a benchmark of Arabic-language news, it is no surprise that BBC Arabic has sunk to such lows.
The management at BBC News is not better. The report accuses the British broadcaster of seeking to dismiss complaints against its coverage and of attempting to protect its image rather than rectifying serious breaches.
As former Director of BBC Television, Danny Cohen, wrote in an op-ed covering this latest scandal, the anti-Israel rot in the BBC reaches all the way to “Director General Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness, whose consistent modus operandi against all criticism appears to be to deny, defend and deflect.”
For months, HonestReporting has been showcasing the negligent management of BBC News by Tim Davie and Deborah Turness that has allowed vile anti-Israel bias to fester throughout its coverage.
Will this leaked report finally force the British broadcaster to come to terms with its blatantly biased reporting, or will it continue to circle the wagons and ignore the anti-Israel morass that is slowly destroying its journalistic reputation?
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Majority of House Democrats vote to defeat Lebanon war powers measure
(JTA) — A House resolution aimed at preventing U.S. involvement in hostilities in Lebanon failed Thursday.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat and fierce critic of Israel, forced a vote on the House floor Thursday. It was defeated 324 to 92, with 91 Democrats voting in favor. The sole Republican vote came from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who will be departing Congress next year after losing his primary.
The resolution, which would have ordered President Donald Trump to remove U.S. troops from Lebanon within seven days, was defeated after Democratic Party leaders noted in a joint statement that there are “no U.S. servicemembers involved in combat operations or hostilities in Lebanon.”
The statement issued by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar continued: “We stand with the Lebanese people, the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces in their efforts to live peacefully and defeat Hezbollah, a violent terrorist organization that is a sworn enemy of the United States.”
Jewish Democratic Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Dan Goldman of New York also voted “no” on the resolution, writing in a joint press release that their opposition “should not be taken as an approval of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s prosecution of Israel’s military action in Lebanon.”
“To the extent that American armed forces are present in Lebanon, it is to support the current Lebanese government, which deserves our assistance,” the statement continued.
But Tlaib defended her resolution in a post on X Thursday ahead of the vote. “The people of Lebanon can’t wait another month for Congress to act,” Tlaib wrote. “Every day that we do nothing, 11 more Lebanese children are killed or injured by the Israeli military in this U.S.-supported invasion. Congress must pass today’s Lebanon War Powers Resolution.”
Tlaib was citing a UNICEF report of data from Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health last month that found 77 children in Lebanon had been killed over the course of a week as Israeli strikes continued to pummel the country.
Some of those who opposed Tlaib’s resolution, including Nadler and Goldman, said they would vote for an alternative version of the resolution that would preserve cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces in their fight against Hezbollah.
The defeat of the resolution came the same day that Hezbollah rejected the latest ceasefire agreement brokered between Israel and Lebanon, as fighting between the Iranian proxy and Israel has intensified in recent weeks.
On Wednesday, the House narrowly passed a resolution for the first time that would limit President Donald Trump’s power to continue the war in Iran. While the development was largely symbolic, it marked a rebuke of the president’s increasingly unpopular strategy in Iran.
On Friday, 85 members of Congress also signed onto a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling on the Trump administration to “use every available diplomatic tool to halt imminent settlement construction in the E-1 area of the West Bank,” a corridor east of Jerusalem.
Citing Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s orders to demolish a Palestinian Bedouin village in the West Bank last month, the letter, which was led by Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Jan Schakowsky, who is Jewish, argued that the issue of settlements in the area had reached a “critical and final inflection point.”
“The window for meaningful diplomatic intervention is closing rapidly, and we believe it is not too late for the United States to act,” read the letter, which was also signed by Nadler and Jewish Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Majority of House Democrats vote to defeat Lebanon war powers measure appeared first on The Forward.
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After years of hostile relations with Israel, Slovenia’s new prime minister signals diplomatic reset
(JTA) — Less than an hour after Slovenia’s newly elected prime minister, Janez Janša, was sworn into office by the country’s parliament, he had the Palestinian flag lowered from a government building.
The move marked the first step in a sharp reorientation of Slovenia’s posture towards Israel under Janša. The right-leaning prime minister, who previously held office in 2022, replaced a prime minister for the liberal Freedom Movement party.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar announced on Thursday that Israel would open its first-ever embassy in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, writing in a post on X that the move was a statement of “friendship, dialogue, and a shared belief in freedom, democracy, and security.”
“The election of Prime Minister @JJansaSDS marks a new chapter in relations between Israel and Slovenia,” Saar wrote. “After years of the hostility of the previous government- we now have an opportunity to rebuild, strengthen, and deepen a real partnership.”
Saar wrote in another post on X that he had spoken with Tone Kajzer, who was appointed as Slovenia’s minister of foreign affairs under the new administration, and that he had “pledged all the assistance necessary” to ensure the “swift establishment” of the embassy.
Janša replied to Saar’s post Thursday, writing, “Welcome to Ljubljana. 🇸🇮🇮🇱Looking forward to a new era in Slovenia-Israel relations.”
Under Slovenia’s outgoing prime minister, Robert Golob, the country voted to recognize a Palestinian state in June 2024 and became one of the few European Union countries to label Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide,” a charge Israel firmly rejects. It was one of five nations to boycott the Eurovision song contest this year over Israel’s participation.
Last year, Slovenia also became the first EU country to impose a travel ban on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
For the country’s Jewish population, which numbers just 100, the spate of anti-Israel measures adopted by the former government contributed to a growing sense of isolation in the country.
But now, Janša, an admirer of President Donald Trump and an ally of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, appears eager to reset relations with Israel.
On Friday, days after an Israeli passenger plane was denied entry to the country by Slovenian authorities in a protest against the Israeli government, Slovenian politician Jernej Vrtovec announced that the airline Israir had “once again been granted authorization to operate flights between Tel Aviv and Ljubljana.”
“The time has come for a responsible Slovenian 🇸🇮foreign policy based on facts, Slovenian national interests and international law,” Janša wrote in a post on X. He added that the “politically and economically harmful period of government support for activist anti-Semitism” had ended.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post After years of hostile relations with Israel, Slovenia’s new prime minister signals diplomatic reset appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel gives in to the politics of debasement
A small episode this week crystallized the broader pathology of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu more clearly than any grand speech or ideological argument ever could: the Knesset vote for state comptroller, one of the most sensitive institutional positions in Israeli public life.
In Israel, the 120 members of the Knesset elect the comptroller by secret ballot. The office audits government ministries, investigates failures of governance, oversees public integrity, and possesses enormous influence over public accountability. In the aftermath of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the Gaza war, the role carries even greater significance. The comptroller may shape future investigations into catastrophic national failures and wartime decision-making.
This week — in a move straight out of United States President Donald Trump’s playbook — Netanyahu nominated his longtime personal lawyer, Michael Rabello, for the role.
Historically, the comptroller’s office has been occupied by senior judges, jurists, or respected public servants with reputations for independence. Figures such as Miriam Ben-Porat, Eliezer Goldberg, and Micha Lindenstrauss embodied a certain ethos: they were stern institutional guardians standing somewhat above partisan warfare.
The idea of placing the prime minister’s own attorney into the country’s central oversight institution struck many Israelis as grotesquely inappropriate.
Yet the truly astonishing part came during the voting itself, in which the opposition candidate was a former justice on the Supreme Court — an institution Netanyahu’s coalition has long vilified. The first round reportedly revealed substantial defections among Netanyahu’s coalition. His preferred candidate fell short. Panic spread.
Suddenly, allegations and reports emerged that coalition lawmakers were being encouraged to photograph or film their ballots in order to prove their loyalty. There was a pause in the proceedings as the Knesset speaker, Likud’s Amir Ohana, received legal advice to not allow phones in the voting area. He restarted the vote anyway. Israeli media filled with coalition lawmakers posting images of themselves voting the right way. The images and reports were the excruciating stuff of banana republics.
I cannot recall ever seeing a similar scene in a functioning democracy. Rabello was elected.
Secret ballots exist precisely because democracies understand that free voting collapses when superiors can verify obedience. The entire purpose of ballot secrecy is to protect individuals from coercion, intimidation, retaliation and patronage systems.
Modern democracies adopted secret ballots in the nineteenth century to break the power of bosses, landlords, oligarchs, and political machines that demanded proof of loyalty.
The blatant violation of these norms by Netanyahu’s coalition helps explain why so many Israelis react to him not merely with opposition, but with exhaustion, fury, and moral revulsion.
It’s not just the corruption trials, the permanent manipulation, the serial falsehoods, the failed strategic assumptions about Hamas, the relentless cultivation of tribal resentment, the attacks on state institutions, the politics of personal loyalty and the transformation of every disagreement into an existential struggle between patriots and traitors. It’s the cumulative exhaustion of watching every institutional norm eventually be subordinated to the most vulgar politics imaginable.
The episode revealed something larger than one parliamentary scandal: the culture Netanyahu has spent years cultivating. It is a system organized increasingly around personal allegiance rather than institutional responsibility. A political environment in which independent judgment becomes suspicious, dissent becomes betrayal, and every institution gradually bends toward one man’s political ambition.
So we have here a prime minister under criminal indictment pushing his own lawyer into a top civil service oversight role.
Opposition leaders Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid plan to appeal Rabello’s election to the Supreme Court, calling the vote “tainted.” Even that might not work. Several government ministers, including the justice minister, have suggested in recent months that they no longer consider court decisions binding.
And that is what outsiders often miss about Netanyahu fatigue in Israel. The anger does not emerge from one scandal, one trial, one war, or one speech. It comes from the constant sense of humiliation. This week, inside Knesset voting booths that were meant to be hidden from view, Israelis saw the whole story compressed into a single degrading scene.
The post Israel gives in to the politics of debasement appeared first on The Forward.
