Exposed: BBC used child of Hamas official in hour long documentary

This article has been updated to include the BBC's statement, posted below, regarding the identity of the presenter.

Thanks to the thorough work of investigative journalist, David Collier, the narrator in a BBC Two documentary aired on Monday has been exposed as a Hamas child propagandist.

The highly emotive documentary, entitled ‘How to Survive a Warzone,’ follows four young people in Gaza, one of whom, Abdullah, 14, is the presenter. There is no acknowledgment that the teenager’s father, Ayman Al Yazouri, is a senior Hamas government minister.

Collier also reveals that one of the two producers, Yousef D. Hammash, is a Palestinian propagandist and activist, and that one of the two Gazan cameramen used a ‘salute’ emoji and the Arabic word for “flood,” on social media, early on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023. 

The terrorists’ name for the unprecedented massacre of 1,200 Israelis and internationals was the ‘Al Aqsa Flood.’

Hamas has long been known to train and indoctrinate children to hate and kill Jews. The armed group, and other Palestinian terrorists, have also been called out for using children as human shields, or in propaganda videos, such as the infamous clip of Muhammed Al-Dura in 2000, the child who wasn’t really killed. 

Now a new form of Palestinian child exploitation has come to light: an indoctrinated child in an active war zone hosting a primetime British news program.

“This is the most glaring error I have seen from the BBC – because it is the most inexcusable,” Collier told ALL ISRAEL NEWS. “They cannot explain this one away.”

“The BBC should take down this documentary – and scrap it,” he said. “They also need to do a full rebuild of the BBC’s information gathering process from areas such as Gaza. They are not fit for purpose.”

The campaign group, Labour Against Antisemitism, has lodged a formal complaint to the BBC, the Daily Telegraph reported.

“This documentary appears to have been a failure of due diligence by the BBC, with Hamas propaganda promoted as reliable fact at the taxpayers’ expense,” said Alex Hearn, a spokesman for the group.

“There needs to be an urgent investigation into how this happened once again,” he added. 

Hearn referred to the fact that several reports have shown a high degree of bias within the BBC’s reporting about Israel and Gaza, since Oct. 7, 2023.

The Asserson report revealed that the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines over 1,500 times within a four-month period. Then the Henry Jackson Society produced a report showing that the mainstream media had constantly reported inaccurate Hamas casualty figures.

Danny Cohen, a former BBC television director, and Baroness Deech, a former BBC governor, also published a report criticizing the BBC’s reporting during the first 11 months of the Hamas-Israel war.

Collier told ALL ISRAEL NEWS that he became involved in investigative work because he “saw that legacy media have been letting the side of truth down for decades now – and I felt I needed to fight back against the demonization of Israel.”

“It is not new at all with the BBC,” he said. “The BBC has an institutionalized problem with the Jewish state.”

Three days after the airing of the documentary the BBC issued a statement on their corrections page saying they were unaware that the child narrating the film is the son of a Hamas official.

"Since the transmission of our documentary on Gaza, the BBC has become aware of the family connections of the film’s narrator, a child called Abdullah.

We’ve promised our audiences the highest standards of transparency, so it is only right that as a result of this new information, we add some more detail to the film before its retransmission. We apologise for the omission of that detail from the original film. The new text reads:

'The narrator of this film is 13 year old Abdullah. His father has worked as a deputy agriculture minister for the Hamas-run government in Gaza. The production team had full editorial control of filming with Abdullah.'

We followed all of our usual compliance procedures in the making of this film, but we had not been informed of this information by the independent producers when we complied and then broadcast the finished film.

The film remains a powerful child’s eye view of the devastating consequences of the war in Gaza which we believe is an invaluable testament to their experiences, and we must meet our commitment to transparency."