The war in Gaza has been a notoriously controversial and difficult story to cover as a journalist. The Israeli government banned international journalists from the territory. At least 171 journalists and media workers in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank have been killed since the war began.
The BBC has faced relentless accusations of bias from all sides. You would think, then, that when it commissioned the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, billed as a “vivid and unflinching view of life” in Gaza seen through the eyes of children, it would have been meticulous in its commissioning and oversight.
Yet almost as soon as the programme was broadcast on February 17, a journalist outside the BBC revealed that one of the children featured in the film, 13-year-old Abdullah, who also acted as its narrator, was the son of a Hamas official. His father, Ayman Al-Yazouri, is a deputy minister of agriculture and therefore, as Hamas runs the government of Gaza, a Hamas official.
