Was the BBC aware that a Hamas leader’s son was featured in its documentary? If not, what was the reason?

The controversial BBC documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone begins with a young boy speaking to the camera inside the bombed out shell of a building.

‘My name is Abdullah,’ he says. ‘I am 13 years old. Have you ever wondered what you’d do if your world was destroyed?’

Over the next hour, the youngster, who is the narrator and central figure in the documentary, guides us through his life in the apocalyptic chaos of his homeland. 

Along the way he introduces us to other children trapped in an endless cycle of terrifying airstrikes and sudden evacuations amid a cacophony of screams and sirens.

‘An unflinching view’ of daily existence in the ironically-named ‘safe zone’ – the area designated by Israel as a place where Palestinians should reside – was how the BBC described it.

We now know, however, that the documentary, made by London-based production company Hoyo Films, epitomised an old saying that truth is the first casualty of war.

Abdullah, as many people might be aware, was not an ordinary participant. He was suspiciously eloquent and informed beyond his years in his recounting of the list of alleged Israeli atrocities. 

When missiles hit a school, for example, he declared with authority that the Israeli army had said the school was being used as a ‘Hamas command centre’, clearly implying that it wasn’t.

The words coming out of his mouth, in perfect English, were undoubtedly scripted – a routine practice in TV and radio programmes – and normally this wouldn’t matter.

But the engaging and likeable Abdullah is the son of a minister in the Hamas-run government. 

Abdullah himself is a seasoned TV performer, we can reveal today, who seems to have been used as a convincing and convenient mouthpiece by the regime on numerous occasions in the past.

The BBC is supposed to be impartial and has now issued a grovelling apology over the film which has ‘damaged the trust our audiences have in our journalism’.

Impartiality does not have to mean absolute neutrality on every issue, but the very least that is required when reporting on such a sensitive and polarising subject is complete transparency. 

At no point was Abdullah’s family connection to a terrorist disclosed to viewers.

His father, Ayman Alyazouri, Deputy Minister for Agriculture in the regime, is related to one of the militant Islamic group’s original founders. 

He studied at British universities, including Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge, and has held senior posts in education and planning in Gaza.

But it goes deeper than that – as we can reveal. The co-director of Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone, which cost more than £400,000 to produce, was Yousef Hammash, who refers on his X page to the ‘Israeli killing machine,’ and who was born in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza which, rightly or wrongly, is regarded as a Hamas stronghold by Israel.

In all, two cameramen and two other children as well as Abdullah either had links with Hamas or have expressed anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli sentiments.

Almost everyone, in other words, directly involved in the making of the film, aired on BBC2 last week, was compromised, in one way or another.

Much of this has not been widely reported.

Only after the revelation about Abdullah became public, and prominent Jewish figures from TV, film and the media demanded it, did the BBC acknowledge his problematic background and pull the programme from iPlayer.

The escalating row, against a backdrop of persistent allegations that a culture of bias against Israel is embedded within the BBC, left the corporation facing difficult and embarrassing questions that it attempted to answer in a statement on Thursday night.

The controversy, as Tory leader Kemi Badenoch pointed out, raised fears of possible payment to Hamas officials.

The BBC said that while Abdullah’s mother was given a ‘limited sum of money’, none of the budget used to make the programme was given to any members of Hamas.

But surely members of the film crew in Gaza, some of whom have displayed apparent hatred towards Israel, didn’t work for nothing. 

Clear evidence exists of two of the cameraman appearing to celebrate the October 7 massacre, when more than 1,200 were killed and over 240 kidnapped by Hamas assassins.

One, Amjad Al Fayoumi, posted the word ‘flood’ with a saluting emoji on X on the day of the atrocity, which, it can only be assumed, was because Hamas called the cross-border bloodbath ‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’, a reaction, it claimed, to Israeli raids on the al-Aqsa mosque and holy sites in occupied East Jerusalem.

The other, Hatem Rawagh, listed as an additional cameraman in the credits, was also busy on X on the day of the atrocity, posting: ‘Whoever missed Oct 6 [1973] in Egypt… Oct 7 is happening in Palestine.’ It was on October 6, 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, that Egypt and Syria attacked Israel.

These posts have been widely interpreted by many, not just Jewish people, as an endorsement of the worst terrorist outrage in Israel’s history.

The scandal has left the BBC in a Catch-22.

If senior executives in current affairs were aware of the most serious Hamas link – that Abdullah was the son of a terrorist leader – why wasn’t this made clear in the film, in the unlikely event of it being allowed to go ahead in such controversial circumstances?

And if they weren’t aware of the connection, why not? After all, it took David Collier, the freelance journalist who broke the story, just three hours to discover the truth on the night of the broadcast.

The latest statement from the BBC, following an initial review, answered this question.

The corporation said Hoyo Films was asked ‘in writing a number of times about any potential connections he [the narrator] and his family might have with Hamas’ but failed to provide the relevant information, an indictment of not just the production company but the BBC as well.

The documentary was ‘remotely directed’ from Britain by film maker Jamie Roberts, who runs Hoyo Films, because foreign journalists have been banned from entering Gaza by Israel.

Roberts founded Hoyo in July 2023, and specialises in ‘agenda-setting films that focus on people at the centre of international stories’. His CV includes Ukraine: Enemy In The Woods and the Emmy-winning and BAFTA nominated Escape From Kabul.

Working alongside him was Yousef Hammash, who left Gaza last year, almost six months after the current conflict began.

Hammash, who works as a producer for Channel 4, describes himself on LinkedIn as an award-winning ‘Palestinian filmmaker from Jabalia camp’. 

Palestinians who have fled Jabalia have given harrowing accounts of bodies lying on the streets in the wake of Israeli bombing raids. Israel says the strikes were justified and claims dozens of Hamas fighters using underground tunnels have been killed in such attacks down the years.

Hammash has also made anti-Israel comments online, referring to the ‘Israeli killing machine’ in response to an Israeli attack on the West Bank, and has labelled an allegation of an Israeli extra-judicial killing as a ‘war crime’.

He is entitled to express any views he chooses about Israel, providing they are legal, but his anti-Israeli output on social media, almost inevitable given his upbringing, will only add to the controversy surrounding the documentary.

Hammash and Roberts, both in their 40s, spent nine months gathering testimonies for Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone.

Yet the teenager Abdullah must surely have been known to them. He was already a familiar face in Channel 4 coverage of Gaza in 2023 and 2024, appearing on one occasion alongside a man presented as his father.

In fact, the man was his uncle, Khalil Abu Shamala, who is believed to be an ex-director of NGO Al Dameer, which campaigns on behalf of Palestinian fighters jailed by Israel and is accused of having links with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), designated a terror group by the US and other western countries.

Abdullah’s frequent cameos on TV do little to allay the suspicion that he was a convenient mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda.

Admittedly, given the pervasive influence of Hamas in Gaza, ensuring presenters and participants in the documentary were suitable must have been unusually difficult.

All the more reason why honesty about their family links was so important.

Among Abdullah’s friends in the film was ten-year-old Renad. According to the biographical notes about the contributors on the Hoyo website, the little girl produces her own online cookery show on the roof of her home ‘whilst bombs land nearby, missiles fly overhead and her family are threatened with evacuation’.

Needless to say, there is no mention of the fact she is the daughter of a former captain in the Hamas-run police force.

On Facebook, her elder sister has posted about ‘revenge’ after a Palestinian gunman shot seven people dead and injured another ten in an attack near a synagogue in East Jerusalem in 2023.

Then there is Zakaria, 11, who dreams of being a paramedic and helps out at the hospital under the mentorship of a senior medic, but who has been photographed posing with Hamas fighters in images circulating online.

Criticisms about the documentary will now be investigated by the ‘editorial complaints unit’ which is separate from BBC News, and a full fact-finding review will also be undertaken, including issues ‘around the use of language, translation and continuity’ which could result in disciplinary action.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (Camera) has accused the BBC of ‘whitewashing’ and ‘sanitising’ the views of those who took part in the film.

The words Yahud or Yahudy – Arabic for ‘Jew’ or ‘Jews’ – were changed to ‘Israel’ or ‘Israeli forces’, it claims, or were removed from the subtitles altogether along with references to ‘jihad’.

The row over the programme spilled onto the streets this week when protesters gathered outside the BBC’s London headquarters and chanted ‘terrorist supporters off our streets’ and ‘Hamas are terrorists, say the word’.

They were alluding to the corporation’s refusal, in the aftermath of October 7, to call Hamas ‘terrorists’ before announcing later that month that ‘where possible’ it would describe Hamas as a ‘proscribed terrorist organisation’.

However, a damning report, backed by Jewish groups, which analysed four months of BBC output across television, radio, online news, podcasts and social media, found Hamas was described as a ‘proscribed’, ‘designated’ or ‘recognised’ terrorist organisation just 409 out of 12,459 times (3.2 per cent).

Critics say bias against Israel has become institutionalised at the BBC.

Only last year, the Mail on Sunday revealed how six of the eight medics at the Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Yunis in Gaza whom the BBC reported as claiming they were tortured and abused by Israeli forces, repeatedly spouted anti-Semitic slurs on social media, ranging from the provocative and inflammatory to the obscene.

‘Serious flaws’ were made, the BBC has acknowledged, in the making of Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone.

‘Some of these flaws were made by the production company, and some by the BBC,’ a spokesperson for the broadcaster said. ‘All of them are unacceptable.’

The BBC should be given credit for acting quickly and accepting ‘full responsibility’ for the shortcomings.

But would these shortcomings exist if there wasn’t an anti-Israeli culture at Broadcasting House?