Surprise: Head of BBC News Caught Pushing Hamas Narrative in Leaked Zoom Call

When it comes to Israel, the BBC can’t seem to stop generating controversy.

As HonestReporting highlighted following last month’s controversy surrounding the airing of a violent anti-IDF chant at the Glastonbury music festival, the British public broadcaster has a long history of bias and misinformation in its coverage of the Jewish state.

This latest controversy (courtesy of the BBC’s CEO of news, Deborah Turness) is actually an offshoot of a separate controversy that rattled the media organization earlier this year.

In February 2025, the BBC removed the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone from its streaming platform after investigative reporter David Collier revealed that the teen narrator of the film was the son of a Hamas minister and that his mother had been remunerated by the production company responsible for filming.

The documentary was also found to have engaged in several instances of mistranslation, sanitizing the interviewee’s language by translating the Arabic word for “Jews” as “Israelis” or “Israeli forces” and representing the word “Jihad” as “battle” or “resistance.”

After the embarrassment of having to pull the documentary, the BBC apologized for the “serious flaws” it contained.

An @BBC news thread – for those who do not understand JUST HOW BAD the BBC Hamas propaganda documentary was. There have been several key scoops – and I thought I would bring the issues together.

Thread 

— David Collier (@mishtal) February 21, 2025

In mid-July, the BBC issued a report admitting that the documentary had breached the broadcasting corporation’s editorial standards, and that it should never have been signed off on the film.

In response to the BBC report, HonestReporting’s Editorial Director, Simon Plosker, released a statement that read in part:

Apologies are not enough. It’s time for the BBC to start reporting impartially and to address those parts of its newsroom that are clearly incapable of doing so.

And now it seems that one of the parts of the newsroom that is “clearly incapable” of reporting impartially is the CEO of news herself, Deborah Turness.

This is Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC News, on a staff call about the Gaza documentary which broke impartiality rules.
Incredibly, she doesn’t seem to know that BOTH the armed wing and the political wing are deemed terrorist organisations by our government. pic.twitter.com/jGuup6x0if

— Nicole Lampert (@nicolelampert) July 16, 2025

A 30-second clip was recently leaked online and shared on social media showing Turness on a Zoom call with BBC employees, stating:

I think it’s really important that we are clear that Abdullah’s father was a deputy agricultural minister and therefore, you know, was a member of the Hamas-run government, which is different to being part of the military wing of Hamas. And I think externally, it’s often simplified that, you know, he was in Hamas. And I think it’s — it’s an important point of detail that we need to continually remind people of the difference and of that connection.

So, not only is a BBC executive trying to downplay the gravity of the serious breach of editorial guidelines that the British broadcaster admitted to in releasing the controversial documentary, but she is also creating a false division within Hamas that is not recognized by the British government.

Since 2021, the entirety of Hamas has been proscribed as a terror organization by the UK government. At the time of this designation, a Home Office statement declared that any distinction between a “military” and “political” wing is “artificial, with Hamas as an organisation involved in committing, participating, preparing for, and encouraging acts of terrorism.”

Perhaps this attempt to whitewash Hamas shouldn’t be so surprising, as the BBC itself has a policy of refusing to refer to the organization and its members as “terrorists.”

However, it should alarm every British taxpayer that one of the executives in charge of news at the British public broadcaster sought to revise reality to exculpate the BBC of any wrongdoing.

What does this say about the BBC’s impartiality? How can the average viewer trust any item that emerges from a newsroom run under the oversight of Deborah Turness?

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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