The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) accused Abdallah al-Jamal, the journalist, of being a “Hamas terrorist” who had detained Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv in his family home.
Jamal, who wrote for The Palestine Chronicle, a news website based in Washington, was killed along with his father, Ahmed, and his wife, Fatima, in the raid that freed the hostages last Saturday. The IDF said Jamal had also been a contributor to Al Jazeera.
The claims raise questions about the extent to which some Palestinian journalists can be regarded as independent and objective reporters working for recognised media organisations.
A spokesman for Camera Arabic said: “The 55 Gazans and Lebanese in question were not listed by BBC reporter Layla Bashar al-Kloub simply because they were civilians in conflict whose deaths ‘are to be regretted’. Rather, it is due to their supposed ‘journalistic work’ that the BBC elevated them apart from other civilians in the first place.
‘Political affiliations’
“Alas, Arabic editors and the ECU [the BBC’s executive complaints unit] alike kept insisting that the way these individuals and their workplaces celebrated killings of Jewish civilians and served as propaganda arms for Hamas, PIJ and Hezbollah was simply a matter of ‘political affiliations’. By refusing to amend the list, they also indicated Arabic-speaking audiences are better off not knowing anything about this.”
Camera Arabic added: “Evidently, BBC staff members are still under the impression that they share the same profession with people who spent their careers disgracing it for the sake of murderous ideologies – a fact which suggests that their own journalism is compromised. This should be cause for concern to both fellow journalists and the corporation’s funding public.”
BBC Arabic has faced repeated criticism since Oct 7 for its coverage of the conflict and what some have claimed is the biased attitude of some of its broadcasters towards Israel.
The Telegraph disclosed last month that the corporation’s head office had been forced to correct BBC Arabic’s coverage of the Gaza conflict every other day on average during the first five months of the war.