The public-service broadcaster presents Israel’s clear crime against humanity as a highly complicated geopolitical matter its audience cannot hope to understand.
An entrance to the BBC broadcasting house in London. (Edwardx, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
You can tell how bad levels of starvation now are in Gaza — as the population there begins the third month of a complete aid blockade by Israel — because last week the BBC finally dedicated a serious chunk of its main news programme, the News at Ten, to the issue.
But while upsetting footage of a skin-and-bones, 5-month-old baby was shown, most of the segment was, of course, dedicated to confusing audiences — by two-sidesing Israel’s genocidal programme of starving 2 million-plus Palestinian civilians.
Particularly shocking was the BBC’s failure in this extended report to mention even once the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a fugitive for months from the International Criminal Court, which wants him on trial for crimes against humanity. Why? For using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population.
I have yet to see the BBC, or any other major British media outlet, append the status “wanted war crimes suspect” when mentioning Netanyahu in stories. That is all the more unconscionable on this occasion, in a story directly related to the very issue — starving a civilian population — he is charged over.
Was mention of the arrest warrant against him avoided because it might signal a little too clearly that the highest legal authorities in the world attribute starvation in Gaza directly to Israel and its government, and do not see it — as the British establishment media apparently do — as some continuing, unfortunate “humanitarian” consequence of “war”?
Predictably misleading too was BBC Verify’s input. It provided a timeline of Israel’s intensified blockade that managed to pin the blame not on Israel, even though it is the one blocking all aid, but implicitly on Hamas.
Verify’s reporter asserted that in early March Israel “blocked humanitarian aid, demanding that Hamas extend a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages.” He then jumped to March 18, stating: “Israel resumed military operations.”
(Screenshot)
Viewers were left — presumably intentionally — with the impression that Hamas had rejected a continuation of the ceasefire and had refused to release the last of the hostages.
None of that is true. In fact, Israel never honoured the ceasefire. It continued to attack Gaza and kill civilians throughout. But worse, Israel’s supposed “extension” was actually its unilateral violation of the ceasefire by insisting on radical changes to the terms that had already been agreed, and which included Hamas releasing the hostages.
Israel broke the ceasefire precisely so it had the pretext it needed to return to starving Gaza’s civilians — and the hostages whose safety it proclaims to care about — as part of its efforts to make them so desperate they are prepared to risk their lives by forcing open the short border with neighboring Sinai sealed by Egypt.
Last week, an Israeli government minister once again made clear what the game plan has been from the very start. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said. Gaza’s population, he added, would be forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries” — in other words, Israel intends to carry out what the rest of us would call the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as it has been doing continuously for eight decades.
Simply astonishing. We’ve had 19 months of Israeli government ministers and military commanders telling us they are destroying Gaza. They’ve destroyed Gaza. And yet western politicians and media still refuse to call it a genocide.
Watch Israel’s lips: IT’S A GENOCIDE. pic.twitter.com/gDIZHW5nNo
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) May 7, 2025
What is the point of the BBC having a Verify service — supposedly there to fact-check and ensure viewers get only the unvarnished truth — when its team are themselves peddling gross distortions of the truth?
The BBC and its Verify service are not keeping viewers informed. They are propagandising them into believing a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics that audiences cannot hope to understand.
The establishment media’s aim is to so confuse audiences that they will throw up their hands and say: “To hell with Israel and the Palestinians! They are as bad as each other. Leave it to the politicians and diplomats to sort out.”
In any other circumstance, it would strike you as obvious that starving children en masse is morally abhorrent, and that anyone who does it, or excuses it, is a monster. The role of the BBC is to persuade you that what should be obvious to you is, in fact, more complicated than you can appreciate.
There may be skin-and-bones babies, but there are also hostages. There may be tens of thousands of children being slaughtered, but there is also a risk of anti-Semitism. Israeli officials may be calling for the eradication of the Palestinian people, but the Jewish state they run needs to be preserved at all costs.
If we could spend five minutes in Gaza without the constant, babbling distractions of these so-called journalists, the truth would be clear. It’s a genocide. It was always a genocide.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East(2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Why is Keir Starmer, Lammy and co still being allowed to be complicit in the Genocide in Palestine bringing Britain into dishonour
‘The role of the BBC is to persuade you that what should be obvious to you is, in fact, more complicated than you can appreciate.’
The BBC – Broadcasting Bourgeois Canards since 1922. Their advertisements want us to believe otherwise, to swallow the lies with little or no question. ‘Take away the noise, the fury, the fighting voices, the distortions, cosmetics, the colour and the flashy effects, but most of all, you can take away the lies, the slander, the misrepresentations that seek to pull us apart, and then … you can find out what is actually happening, and when you find that, then you will find BBC News[peak].’
Such vomit-inducing chutzpah! How should we react to media lies, omissions, distortions and half-truths, as well as conspiracy theories and alternative facts? We should remember Marx’s favourite motto – doubt everything! – and this from his German Ideology (1845): ‘ the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production.’ The BBC has a long history of supporting the status quo: in the General Strike of 1926 it clearly sided against our class. This quote attributed to Orwell is also apposite: ‘during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.’
MSDNC did a similarly horrid piece purporting to do brave journalism about the horror in Gaza, only in their case it was some kind of mystery occurrence outside human ken.
But I think these establishment mouthpieces are increasingly transparently embarrassing themselves. People know who’s doing it, and the legacy media refusing to say it just looks clownish and cowardly.
Excellent piece by Cook!
“Was mention of the arrest warrant against him avoided because it might signal a little too clearly that the highest legal authorities in the world attribute starvation in Gaza directly to Israel and its government, and do not see it — as the British establishment media apparently do — as some continuing, unfortunate “humanitarian” consequence of “war””
Or because the UK is complicit in the genocide by sending bombs, ammunition, gun parts etc to israel:
Xxxx://labourhub.org.uk/2025/05/07/groundbreaking-report-reveals-extraordinary-scale-of-uk-arms-exports-to-israel-and-finds-that-the-government-has-misled-the-public/
The full report can be read/downloaded from the above link.