OPINION
General view of Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters (Image: Getty)
The British Broadcasting Corporation, that venerable titan of taxpayer-funded journalism, has long cloaked itself in the mantle of impartiality—a gold standard for truth in a world awash with bias.
Yet, in the sordid affair of its Gaza documentary Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, the has been caught not merely napping, but in bed with Hamas, its credibility shredded by the relentless spade of one man: David Collier.
This is no mere blip; it’s a gaping wound in the ’s narrative, and Collier, a renowned investigative journalist, has blown it wide open with a precision that should make every licence-fee payer sit up and take notice.
The documentary, aired on Two and produced by Hoyo Films, was pitched as a raw, child’s-eye view of life in Gaza—a noble endeavour, one might think, to humanise the toll of war. Its narrator, 14-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri, was presented as an ordinary Gazan, his voice a poignant thread through the chaos.
But within five hours—five hours!—Collier, armed with nothing more than a computer in north London, unearthed a truth the ’s vast resources failed to detect: Abdullah is the son of Ayman Al-Yazouri, a deputy minister in Hamas’s Gaza government. “Hamas royalty,” Collier dubbed him, and the label sticks.
This was no innocent oversight; it was a catastrophic failure of due diligence that turned a supposed testament to suffering into amegaphone for a terrorist organisation Britain itself proscribes.
Don’t miss…
Collier’s revelation, swift and surgical, sparked a firestorm. The yanked the film from iPlayer, its chairman Samir Shah calling it “a dagger to the heart” of the broadcaster’s claim to trustworthiness.
Anti-terror police are now sniffing around, probing whether the £400,000 production—funded by you, the British public—funneled cash to Hamas via payments to Abdullah’s family.
Hoyo Films admitted to paying the boy’s mother (routed through his sister’s account), a detail the claims it didn’t knowuntil Collier’s exposé hit. Five hundred media luminaries, from to Ken Loach, rallied to defend the film, decrying its removal as censorship.
But their bleating rings hollow against the stark reality: the , wittingly or not, platformed a narrative shaped by Hamas’s elite, not Gaza’s everyman.
What makes this scandal so damning is the ’s stubborn refusal to see what Collier saw in a fraction of the time it took their teams to sip their morning tea. “I couldn’t have scripted this better,” he told The Times of . “I actually caught them in bed with Hamas.”
His work isn’t just a scoop—it’s a masterclass in journalistic standards, a lone warrior’s stand against an institution bloated with resources yet starved of rigour.
While the floundered, issuing mealy-mouthed apologies and promising reviews, Collier dug deeper, exposing not just Abdullah’s ties but a pattern of bias that’s festered for years.
The cameraman, Hatem Rawagh, had tweeted praise for the October 7 massacre—another tidbit the missed. Subtitles swapped “Jews” for “Israelis,” softening Hamas’s antisemitic venom into something more palatable. This wasn’t journalism; it was curation for a cause.
…
Collier’s triumph lies in his simplicity: one man, one computer, and an unrelenting nose for truth. He’s no stranger to the trenches—years spent dissecting anti- narratives have honed his instincts—but this coup may be his finest hour.
“I’m just one guy,” he said, a humble flex that underscores the ’s shame. Where their “vast, taxpayer-funded resources” failed, Collier succeeded, not because of flashy tools but because of a dogged commitment to facts over feelings.
His findings have forced even the ’s fiercest critics to pause—some anti- voices who backed the film have gone quiet, their moralising drowned out by the weight of evidence.
The fallout could be seismic. Shah’s “watershed moment” rhetoric hints at a reckoning, but the ’s history of dodging accountability suggests otherwise.
Protests outside its London headquarters, questions in Parliament, and a government summons to explain itself—all triggered by Collier’s spark—may yet force change.
He believes it’s “vital to keep the pressure on,” and he’s right. The ’s initial defence—that it’s “impossible to check the background of everybody in Gaza”—is risible, a cop-out demolished by Collier’s five-hour feat. If he can do it, why can’t they?
This isn’t just about one film; it’s about a narrative the has peddled too long, one that’s tilted against with a consistency that reeks of agenda.
Collier’s work has ripped the mask off, exposing not just incompetence but a willingness to let Hamas pull strings behind a veneer of neutrality.
His journalistic standards—relentless, unapologetic, and rooted in evidence—have blown a hole in that narrative, leaving the scrambling to patch it with platitudes.
Licence-fee payers deserve better than propaganda dressed up as public service. Thanks to David Collier, they now know just how badly they’ve been served.