Video: boy targeted by Israel lobby to cow BBC to delete Gaza documentary was in award-winning C4 doc

Propagandists didn’t have issue in 2023 with family links, when Israel’s reputation wasn’t yet fully shredded

The BBC has rightly been under fire for deleting its documentary Gaza: how to survive a warzone after Israel’s far-right UK ambassador Tzipi Hotovely and an array of Israel lobbyists complained about it. The propagandists and Hotovely focused initially on the fact that Abdullah Al-Yazouri, the 15yo main narrator of the documentary about the suffering of Palestinians, especially children and young people, under Israel’s genocide of more than 200,000 people, was the son of an agriculture official in the Gaza government.

Once the BBC had added a note about Al-Yazouri’s family connection to the beginning of the programme the complainers – seemingly outraged that a BBC programme would humanise the Palestinians and their suffering – switched their attention to unspecified ‘other concerns’ and the BBC caved in and deleted the documentary indefinitely.

But in December 2023, two months after the start of Israel’s genocide, a then-13yo Abdullah featured in a Channel 4 News documentary titled “Inside Gaza: Israel and Hamas at war”:

Strangely, Israel’s lobbyists had no problem with his participation in the programme – even after Channel 4 and the film-makers won an Emmy award for it, perhaps in part because Channel 4 said at the time that its documentary it focused on a “forensic minute-by-minute anatomy of Hamas’ attacks” on 7 October.

But Channel 4 news editor Esme Wren also noted the reason why its programme needed to be made by local people, because Israel has banned international journalists from Gaza in an attempt to cover its crimes:

Eyewitness reporting is the very essence of what we do and this conflict has been so challenging because we, along with international journalists, have been banned from Gaza itself.

That’s why, in this period, we have had to work very closely with independent journalists and filmmakers, particularly in Gaza itself, to bear witness to the truth, to get to the heart of the story.

And on that note, I want to thank in particular Yousef Hammash who couldn’t be with us tonight. It’s to him we owe so much of the credit.”

The Emmy was also dedicated on the night to journalists and media workers killed covering this ongoing conflict, with the total number of dead now registered at 116.

Palestinian-born London independent film-maker Yousef Hammash is also the co-creator of the BBC’s now-deleted documentary.

So why would Israel-lobbyists make no fuss about Abdullah Al-Yazouri’s participation in a programme in December 2023, but go to such lengths of smears and propaganda about one in February 2025? Two months after the start of Israel’s genocide, outrage and resistance were building among millions globally, but the World Court and United Nations had not yet stated that Israel is committing genocide; the International Court of Justice had not issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant; Israel’s criminality and terrorism were clear to all who were paying attention – but many were not; Israel’s atrocity propaganda had already been exposed as lies, but most were not aware.

After sixteen months of Israel’s genocidal mass murder in Gaza and the West Bank, its starvation campaign, ceasefire breaches, terrorist attacks in Lebanon and Syria, the admission by Gallant and the Israeli media that Israel killed many and likely most Israelis who died on 7 October, the World Court’s finding that Israel is ‘plausibly’ committing genocide and the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants, the collapse of all Israel’s claims and excuses – Israel’s fabricated reputation lies in shreds.

And for the BBC – the BBC! – to finally make a documentary that humanises Palestinians and exposes even a little of the reality of Israel as the terror and apartheid state it is, well that is too much for its dwindling band of apologists to countenance.

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