BBC presenter forced to apologise after calling Hamas hostages ‘prisoners’

A BBC journalist has been forced to apologised after comments describing Israeli hostages held by Hamas as “prisoners” sparked outrage online.

News anchor Nicky Schiller told viewers on Friday that three “ prisoners” would be released by the terror group on Saturday.

Yarden Bibas, 35, Ofer Kalderon, 54, and Keith Siegel, 65, were taken hostage during ’ terror attacks of October 7, 2023. The men were handed over by militants to Red Cross officials in Khan Tounis on Saturday morning.

Speaking on the ’s news channel on Friday, Mr Schiller said: “Confirmation in the last couple of hours, first from Hamas, that three Israeli prisoners, all men this time, will be released tomorrow and then we will see 90 Palestinian prisoners freed from Israeli jails.”

One person took to social media to accuse the of “an insane word game” after the news update. They wrote: “They just keep bending over backwards to twist the narrative, but the truth is plain: Kidnapped civilians are hostages not ‘prisoners’.”

Another wrote: “When the refers to babies and children as ‘prisoners’, when they are hostages taken by Hamas terrorists, you know that the reputation of our national broadcaster is in the gutter”, while a third described the slip of tongue as “dismal”.

The broadcaster issued an apology for the comments on Friday. The message, issued live on air, stated: “Earlier today on News reported on the names of those three Israeli hostages who are due to be freed tomorrow.

“At one point during the coverage we mistakenly called the hostages ‘prisoners’ and we would like to apologise.”

It’s not the first time the has found itself in hot water for its coverage of the Middle Eastern conflict. The state-funded broadcaster was accused of breaching its own editorial guidelines over 1,500 times when the -Gaza coverage was at its peak.

The Asserson Report also found that in over 12,000 pieces of coverage, Hamas was described as a “terrorist organisation” just 3.2% of the time, while was repeatedly linked to terms including “genocide” and “war crimes”.

The document, compiled by -based British lawyer Trevor Asserson based its findings on work from around 20 lawyers and data scientists and used AI to trawl through nine million pieces of output over a four-month period, The Telegraph reported.

It concluded that there was “a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the of its own editorial guidelines on impartiality, fairness and establishing the truth.”

A spokesperson questioned the methodology of the report, however, including its “heavy reliance on AI and interpretation of editorial guidelines”.

They added: “We don’t think coverage can be assessed solely by counting particular words divorced from context. We are required to achieve due impartiality, rather than the ‘balance of sympathy’ proposed in the report, and we believe our knowledgeable and dedicated correspondents are achieving this, despite the highly complex, challenging and polarising nature of the conflict.

“However, we will consider the report carefully and respond directly to the authors once we have had time to study it in detail.”