Three days after the announcement of the resumption of airdrops of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, the BBC News website published a filmed report showing Jeremy Bowen on one of the Jordanian flights, the synopsis to which states:
“The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen boarded a Jordanian military plane dropping humanitarian aid into Gaza.
He was told by the Jordanians that Israel did not want our crew to film outside the plane’s windows while he was onboard.”
Bowen repeated that messaging in the report itself but made no effort to explain to audiences why Israel would not want foreign journalists to potentially disclose troop positions and movements in filmed aerial footage. Instead he alleged that the reason is that Israel does not want journalists to film “the devastation inside Gaza” – despite that having already been the topic of several BBC reports based on satellite images.
As we reported last week, an ITV correspondent obviously ignored those potentially life-saving instructions:
ITV NEWS ABANDONS PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM IN REPORT ON GAZA
A couple of days later, the Independent’s Bel Trew did the same.
The day after that – August 7th – the BBC News website published a filmed report (apparently taken from a TV interview) titled “Aerial footage shows Gaza in ruins”.
“Aerial footage of Gaza filmed by the Independent newspaper’s Chief International Correspondent Bel Trew and shared with the BBC shows parts of Gaza almost entirely in ruins after nearly two years of Israeli bombardment and military ground incursions.
Trew told the BBC she took the footage while on a military flight dropping food into the territory and could see “absolute destruction” as far as the horizon. She described the scene as “chilling”.”
The BBC’s report consists entirely of a monologue from Trew, with no explanations added apart from credit for the “shared” footage. Trew begins by telling viewers that: [emphasis in italics in the original]
Trew: “Honestly, it was chilling to see, as you can probably look at the images I took. The ground in Gaza looks like the bottom of a firepit. Just absolute destruction all the way to the horizon on a level that I haven’t seen before – and I was in Gaza during the 2012 war and the 2014 war and in the aftermath of the 2021 war.”
The “2012 war” was in fact an eight-day operation. The 2014 war – Operation Protective Edge – lasted fifty days and the “2021 war” was an eleven-day operation. Obviously the level of damage seen by Trew after twenty-two months of the current war would be greater than in any of those three much shorter operations.
Like ITV’s Emma Murphy, Trew does not mention the word Hamas even once in her monologue. She has nothing whatsoever to tell viewers about the highly relevant issue of that terrorist organisation’s underground tunnel network, which was recently described in an INSS report as follows:
“At the onset of the war, the length of Gaza’s “underground” is estimated to have been 500–600 kilometers. It connected all of Hamas’s military installations, headquarters, and facilities throughout the Gaza Strip. It linked them with thousands of shafts that led to combat positions inside buildings in urban areas, as well as to positions used for launching rockets at Israel. Due to the dangers involved in clearing the tunnels, the process is slow, and their destruction requires massive quantities of explosives and other specialized means.”
Likewise, Trew makes no mention of the issue of the relevant and long-known Hamas tactics such as booby-trapping buildings with explosives and placing IEDs on roads which have cost the lives of many Israeli soldiers. She goes on to tell viewers that:
Trew: “I also saw Palestinian families in tents; in so many tents that it stretched straight to the horizon. This is the people who are displaced in the south – in the so-called humanitarian zone. Just today someone who lives there sent me a message saying there’d been an airstrike, so there have been strikes even on those areas where people are being forced to move to, to flee their homes.”
Trew of course has nothing to tell viewers about the exploitation of the humanitarian zone by terrorists for the purpose of rocket fire or the fact that combatants deliberately hide there among the civilian population.
Trew closes her monologue with promotion of messaging concerning airdrops which is remarkably similar to that promoted by Hamas.
Trew: “You know these aid drops; they are supposed to be the last desperate resort. At the moment [sic] Gaza is only 25 miles long. It is completely accessible by land and sea. The UN and some of the world’s most respected aid organisations have said the easiest way to get food in is via land and a ceasefire. These airdrops are expensive, they’re inefficient and they can be deadly.”
Since May 20th 2025, around 100,000 tons of food have entered the Gaza Strip via land. Not only does Trew neglect to provide that relevant information, but she completely avoids the issues of the UN’s failure to distribute that aid efficiently and the theft of aid by Hamas and other profiteers.
Despite Trew’s ‘report’ being nothing more than a blatant propaganda exercise, the BBC News website chose not only to publish it as a stand-alone item but also to promote that footage filmed contrary to instructions in at least three written reports – see here, here and here.
Once again the BBC demonstrates that its self-conscription to the promotion of chosen narratives inevitably takes priority over providing its audiences with accurate and impartial journalism.
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hOW SELFISH OF BOWEN – HE STARVED MORE PEOPLE IN GAZA BY TAKING UP SOME WEIGHT OF THE AID!!!!!!!