"Can you tell us how he died, where, and why?"

This question by Egyptian footballer Mohamed Salah has been liked 9,60,000 times on X. Salah asked this question, quote-tweeting the Union of European Football Associations’s “farewell” to Suleiman al-Obeid, the footballer known as the “Palestinian Pelé.” “A talent who gave hope to countless children, even in the darkest of times,” wrote the UEFA. That was it.

In truth, al-Obeid was shot dead by Israeli forces on August 6, while he waited for humanitarian aid in southern Gaza. He is one of more than 60,000 people killed in Israel’s unrelenting and genocidal attacks on Gaza. 

Salah’s question does the trick because through it, he asks for this essential context behind the footballer’s death. In its simplicity, it strikes at a common and devastating aspect of communication surrounding this extraordinary march of cruelty in Gaza – the insidious incapacity of people in authority and communicators to tell the whole truth.

While the UEFA, as a controversial body of football organisers, can be relegated to an echelon from which no better is expected, hitherto trusted news outlets which many look to for authentic accounts of what really happening have let us down in astounding ways in giving exactly what Salah asked for in his post – context. 

A report by the Centre for Media Monitoring in the United Kingdom, which works to ensure unbiased and accurate reporting on Muslims and Islam, finds an extreme media bias towards Israel in reporting on Palestinian fatalities in a name held in high regard worldwide and especially in India, the UK’s public service broadcaster, the BBC. This bias, the report illustrates, is expressed through omission, passive language when Israel is responsible, glaring editorial choices and – as Salah highlighted – the removal of context.

The CfMM looks at the first year of Israel’s war on Gaza, between October 7, 2023 and October 6, 2024, and studies 3,873 articles and 32,092 broadcast segments over television and radio.

The report asks:

“The evidence clearly suggests that within the BBC’s editorial framework, Palestinian lives simply do not matter equally. In an asymmetric conflict, responsible journalism demands not only neutrality of tone, but rigour in representing the scale and severity of harm – especially to those whose voices are already marginalised in the broader media narrative. The following findings beg the question: does the BBC find Palestinian suffering less newsworthy than Israeli suffering, or is Israeli violence less shocking and newsworthy than Palestinian violence?”

'By design'

The report came at around the same time when 121 BBC employees anonymously wrote a letter to its director general, Tim Davie, complaining that the outlet has become a mouthpiece for Israel. As many as 306 media figures also signed this letter that said that it had become “increasingly clear” to audiences that the BBC’s reporting on Israel/Palestine since October 2023 fell short of its own editorial standards. “There is a gulf between the BBC’s coverage of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank and what our audiences can see is happening via multiple credible sources including human rights organisations, staff at the UN and journalists on the ground,” the letter said.

The letter did not mince words and said that this did not happen by accident, but “rather by design.”

“Much of the BBC’s coverage in this area is defined by anti-Palestinian racism. The inconsistent manner in which guidance is applied draws into focus the role of Sir Robbie Gibb, on the BBC Board and BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee. We are concerned that an individual with close ties to the Jewish Chronicle, an outlet that has repeatedly published anti-Palestinian and often racist content, has a say in the BBC's editorial decisions in any capacity, including the decision not to broadcast ‘Gaza: Medics Under Fire’,” the letter said. 

Journalist Owen Jones, who late last year wrote a crucial piece on Drop Site News titled ‘BBC's Civil War Over Gaza’, recorded this letter by BBC employees in his Substack post, noting that the mention of Gibb begs further questions. “Can you imagine someone with left-wing and pro-Palestinian connections having this power and influence?” he asked.

Jones also noted that there “hasn’t even been a pretence by the BBC that Palestinian life has even the fraction of the worth of an Israeli life,” something that the CfMM’s report illustrates in no uncertain terms.

To go back to the essentiality of context, the CfMM report notes that during its analysis period, 42,010 Palestinians and 1,246 Israelis were killed – a 34:1 ratio that provides crucial context for assessing the balance of the BBC’s coverage. 

Despite this, the report says, the BBC ran an almost equal number of articles profiling personal and humanising stories about specific Israeli or Palestinian victims (279 for Palestinians versus 201 for Israelis).

It illustrates how, despite Gaza enduring mass civilian casualties for many months, sympathetic articles with emotive, humanising or personal stories of Palestinians appeared only twice as often as those for Israelis.

BBC article headlines mentioned Palestinian casualties just two times more than Israeli casualties, despite 34x more Gazan deaths.

Crucially, the BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage across articles, and 19 times more across TV/radio, when measured on a per-fatality basis in proportion to the 34:1 Gazan-Israeli death toll.

In what the BBC is not alone in, it attached the ‘Hamas-run’ qualifier (i.e., ‘Hamas-run health ministry’) to Palestinian casualty figures in 1,155 articles in that one year – almost as many times as

the Palestinian death toll was mentioned across BBC articles – thereby undermining Gazan casualties and Palestinian suffering, more generally, the report says. 

Language plays an important role, as the report highlights and not just emotive.

The word ‘massacre(d)’ was applied almost 18 times more frequently to Israeli victims than Palestinian victims in BBC articles. “Despite numerous mass casualty attacks against Palestinians, the term never appeared in headlines describing Palestinian deaths,” the report says.

BBC articles used emotive terms (‘atrocities’, ‘slaughter’, ‘barbaric’, ‘deadly’, ‘brutal’) almost four times as much when describing Israeli victims. In TV/radio, 70% of all emotive terms used by BBC correspondents and presenters referred to Israeli victims of attacks.

Israelis are ‘butchered’, Palestinians simply ‘die, the report noted.

Similarly, ‘murder(ed)’ was referenced 220 times for actions against Israelis and just once for Palestinians.

Again, this is tradition perfected by the likes of the New York Times, but when reporting attacks on Palestinians, the BBC consistently obscured Israeli responsibility through passive language in headlines (e.g., ‘Air strike on Gaza school kills at least 15 people’ rather than identifying Israel as the perpetrator).

The BBC also interviewed significantly fewer Palestinians than Israelis (1,085 v 2,350) on TV and radio and shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian perspective (2,340 v 217), even when interviewing neutral third parties like humanitarian organisations.

It pressed 38 interviewees to condemn Hamas’s October 7 attacks. Equivalent questioning to condemn Israel’s actions took place zero time.

“The systematic omission of key historical and contemporary context has acquired an institutional quality at the BBC,” the report observes, adding that the October 7 attack by Hamas – while rightly condemned – gives no context, thereby reinforcing the Israeli government’s narrative of self-defence.

Palestinians, historians and all those uninterested in furthering Israel’s narrative have been united in noting that October 7, 2023 was not the “starting point” of Israel’s colonial violence in West Asia. “Yet only 0.5% of articles referenced any historical or contemporary context, namely: Israel’s occupation and violence against Palestinians in the months, years and decades before 7 October, as documented by many organisations, such as the UN and Amnesty International,” the CfMM report notes.

The BBC only mentioned ‘occupation’ 14 times in news articles when providing context to October 7 (0.3% of articles); ‘blockade’ 3 times (0.08%), and ‘settlements’ just once (0.03%) – while across TV/radio, ‘occupation’ appeared in only 33 clips (0.3%), ‘blockade’ in 20 (0.2%), and ‘settlements’ in 8 (0.07%).

The report also says that despite being essential context for understanding the October 7 attack, Palestinian fatalities of Israeli violence before this attack appeared in just one article (0.03%), references to international law violations in just one article (0.03%), and Palestinian expulsions-from-homes in just one article (0.03%).

Only 2% of articles mentioned the term ‘apartheid’, thereby concealing a crucial framework through which to understand the structural nature of Israel’s current war on Gaza and Palestine more generally.

These precise findings might come as a surprise to many in India, where the BBC keeps a crucial tab on human rights, governance and other issues – often facing the brunt of government ire. This only goes to show how careful news consumers need to be in forming opinions on the basis of what they see. 

There are chinks in the BBC’s armour of false representation, however. The outlet historically broadcasts the Glastonbury festival live. This year, punk-rap duo Bob Vylan grabbed the headlines by asking for Palestine to be freed and chanting “Death, death to the IDF,” – Israel’s army. The BBC was unable to stop its broadcast but has since bent over backwards in contrition over this, reporting on a Jewish charity’s claim as recently as four days ago that “antisemitic incidents spiked” since the band’s performance aired. The charity’s report does not describe even one act of “antisemitism” and bases itself entirely on self-reported incidents recorded by it. The timeframe in which these attacks are said to have “spiked” is also the same in which support for Israel, even from committed quarters, has faltered. This is largely thanks to images of starving Gazans, including children.

Last month, BBC released a short statement along with three other major bringers of news, saying that it was “desperately concerned” for its journalists in Gaza. The CfMM report finds that while 167 journalists have been killed in Gaza between October 7 2023 and February 2025, only 11 have been reported by the BBC, just 6%.

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