The BBC lacks “moral clarity” and has demonstrated a clear bias in favour of Gaza, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a heated Sunday exchange on the British public broadcaster.
In an interview with longtime BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire, the former Israeli leader accused the BBC of having “taken the Gaza” side in the conflict between the Jewish state and the Islamist Hamas terror organisation that killed over 1,200 Israelis and tourists in a flurry of attacks on October 7th.
During the exchange, Derbyshire accused Israel of not abiding by Geneva Convention laws on targeting civilians, a claim that former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett denied, citing Israel’s warning to the citizens of Gaza to evacuate.
Bennet went on to draw the distinction between the military tactics of Israel and that of Hamas, whom he said: “Butchered babies, burned them alive, they pulled a baby out of a pregnant mom and then beheaded the baby, they beheaded the mom, they raped young girls. This is what we are dealing with.”
“The Geneva Conventions first and foremost tell a country ‘you need to defend yourself’, and we will defend ourselves,” he added.
The ex-Israeli PM then went on to accuse the BBC of being biased in its reporting of the war, citing the fact that the publicly-funded broadcaster had uncritically reported claims from Hamas that Israel was responsible for a bombing at a hospital in Gaza, while the preponderance of evidence now points to the blast resulting from a misfired rocket from within Gaza.
“I understand the BBC has taken the Gazan side because all your questions are only about the Gazan civilians,” Bennet continued.
“You only care about one side, that is the BBC way… If you think there is a balance here between two equal sides then you are lacking moral clarity. And BBC, I must say, is lacking moral clarity. What you guys did the past week, shame on you,” he said.
Derbyshire denied bias and said: “Before I spoke to you, Mr Bennett, I spoke to a veteran Palestinian politician and I asked her about the massacre of Israeli civilians in southern Israel.”
Moments later, Bennet’s feed from Tel Aviv cut out. The BBC claimed that it was a result of technical difficulties, the Daily Mail reported.
The exchange came amid growing criticism of the public broadcaster’s coverage of the war in Israel, with a former director at the BBC, Danny Cohen writing in The Telegraph that the BBC’s apparently false reporting of the explosion at the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza exposed the institutional “bias and deep-rooted prejudice” at the broadcaster.
A BBC correspondent had claimed shortly after the blast: “It’s hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion other than an Israeli air strike or several air strikes.”
“When the BBC gets its reporting this badly wrong it fuels the dangerous poison of anti-Semitism… It provides excuses for the prejudiced to act out their racism online or, more frighteningly, in the real world,” the former BBC director said.
On Saturday, BBC Verify’s ‘disinformation’ correspondent Marianna Spring — who has been accused of spreading false information — published a video guide on spotting disinformation on social media during the war in Israel. The video did not mention the public broadcaster’s apparent role in spreading disinformation.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect a revised number on the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel. The Israeli government estimate of 1,400 was revised to around 1,200, according to Reuters.
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