The Telegraph recently reported on a CAMERA study of headlines to reports published on the BBC News website’s dedicated “Israel-Gaza war” page in the two years following the outbreak of the war between Hamas and Israel.
The Jewish Chronicle also covered the story.
The study of over 2,500 articles evaluates whether each headline suggests that the corresponding article holds Hamas or Israel to account, or whether it remains neutral or focuses on both or a third party. It does not assess the articles themselves, which may, of course, present a more nuanced perspective or hold multiple parties to account.
By focusing solely on the headlines, the data highlights how the BBC has framed the conflict. The dataset covers the period from October 7, 2023, to October 7, 2025, and is drawn exclusively from the BBC’s “Israel-Gaza war” webpage.
- Over the two-year period of conflict, BBC News headlines were three times more likely to hold Israel to account than Hamas.
- Headlines featuring claims of ‘genocide’, ‘famine’ or ‘starvation’ in Gaza appeared 45 times over 24 months but references to Hamas committing ‘war crimes’ appeared just once.
- Just one headline focused on a spate of brutal and filmed public executions by Hamas – compared to 33 headlines in just two months promoting claims that Israeli forces killed civilians as they sought food from Gaza aid sites.
On the BBC News website’s “Israel-Gaza war” page a total of 2,533 stories were published about the war and the political fallout of the conflict in the two years since the October 7th terror attack by Hamas.
Analysis of the headlines to those stories, carried out by CAMERA, shows that the focus of BBC News articles was three times more likely to be critical of Israel than of Hamas.
Overall, a third of all headlines were critical of Israel (35%) while just 11% of were headlines were critical of Hamas. A little over half the stories had neutral headlines. Many of those covered the political fallout of the conflict in Europe and the United States as well as charting a rise tide in antisemitic attacks.
Israel was frequently accused of using aid as a weapon of war, with repeated claims of malnutrition and starvation appearing in the headlines. The words ‘starving’ or ‘starvation’ were used 21 times in headlines, while ‘famine’ was used ten times and ‘war crimes’ six. ‘Genocide’ or ‘genocidal’ appeared 14 times in headlines.
In the headlines, Hamas fighters were referred to as “militants” and “gunmen” rather than terrorists, even as an attributed quote. Just one headline referenced the “war crimes” the terror group committed and six stories concerned the rapes and sexual violence carried out by Hamas on October 7th and against captured hostages.
Over two years, headlines holding Israel to account outweighed those that were critical of Hamas in all but three months – the first being October 2023.
By November, 2023, as Israel’s ground war against Hamas began, the scrutiny of Israel’s military action began to outweigh the mass murder, rapes and kidnapping by Hamas in the previous month.
BBC News headlines focused on Israel’s actions more than the actions of Hamas in every month of 2024. Only in January and February of 2025 did critical headlines about Hamas outweigh those focused on Israel. This coincided with the beginning of a ceasefire that saw the release of emaciated hostages held by Hamas in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
The macabre pantomime Hamas staged with each release of hostages drew widespread condemnation, as did the malnourished appearance of some of the men. However, the outrage was downplayed in BBC News headlines, which made just one reference to a “carefully staged handover” and one to the hostages appearing “gaunt”.
The condemnation of Hamas for returning the wrong body of kidnapped Israeli mother Shiri Bibas and the confirmation that her young children had been murdered by Hamas and their bodies mutilated was also downplayed. Matter-of-fact headlines declared: “Hamas failure to return body is new ceasefire setback” and “Israel says forensics show Bibas children killed by captors”.
That tone was also reflected in the headlines covering the October 7th atrocities, which were almost entirely absent of emotive language and focused more on Israel’s likely “retaliation”. “PM says Israel at war after 250 killed in attack from Gaza,” said one headline on the day of the Hamas assault. Another read: “Hamas attack shocks Israel, but what comes next?”.
On October 8th 2023, BBC News headlines included: “How Hamas staged attack no one thought possible” and “Gaza hospital deluged as Israel retaliation kills and wounds hundreds”.
Throughout the conflict, BBC News headlines featured the emotive language of others in the corporation’s stories about Gaza. Quotes that were featured in headlines included descriptions of Gaza as being like “an atomic bomb has dropped” and a “warzone on steroids”. The Gaza Strip was also described as a “killing field,” a “conveyer belt of carnage” and “worse than hell on earth” in headlines.
The headlines also gave heavy weight in 2025 to claims that civilians were being killed at aid sites funded by the United States and run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). In just two months there were 33 separate headlines highlighting such claims, despite the lack of any videos or photographic evidence to support them. There were just two headlines over the same time period covering the murder and attacks of aid workers at GHF sites by Hamas.
Hadar Sela, spokeswoman for the Committee for Accuracy and Middle East Reporting and Analysis, (CAMERA UK) said:
“News headlines, of course, are not the whole of the story but they do give a sense of the main focus of an article. It is clear from our analysis that just one month after those horrific Hamas atrocities, the focus for BBC News had quickly shifted to holding Israel to account. Since then, we have seen the constant promotion of anti-Israel narratives over impartial reporting in these headlines. Unsubstantiated claims of Israel committing genocide, of starving the people of Gaza and killing civilians as they queued for aid are a near constant feature of these headlines – while the robust denials of these charges are all too often buried at the bottom of the article.
In contrast, the evidence that Hamas filmed and put out for the world to see – evidence of hundreds of young festival goers brutally murdered, whole families living in kibbutzim being slaughtered, of hostages dragged from friends or relatives to the hell of the Hamas terror tunnels to be starved and beaten – they feature far less in headlines. For every one headline that is critical of Hamas, there are three that hold Israel to account. For two years, BBC News headlines have displayed an almost naïve acceptance of any claim made by Hamas, while treating statements made by Israel with the utmost scepticism. Such blatant bias has helped fuel a surge in antisemitism within the UK and turned Britain into a hostile environment for the Jewish community.”
Headlines covering stories by senior BBC journalists also suggest bias in their reporting of the conflict. More than half the headlines to stories written by International Editor Jeremy Bowen about the conflict were critical of Israel. Of the 60 articles he penned, 33 had headlines that held Israel to account while just three took Hamas to task.
Of the 35 stories written under Special Correspondent Fergal Keane’s byline, 29 had headlines that held Israel to account and six were neutral. He wrote no stories headlined in a way that held Hamas to account for its actions.
Almost half the stories written by BBC Middle East correspondent Yolande Knell about the conflict (41 out of a total of 85) had headlines that were critical of Israel, with just 12 that held Hamas to account.
Rushdi Abualouf, the BBC’s Gaza Correspondent, wrote 110 stories, of which 53 had headlines that were critical of Israel, compared to 20 that held Hamas to account.
The most prolific BBC journalist on the BBC News Israel-Gaza page was David Gritten, on the BBC’s Middle East desk. He wrote 253 articles: 139 head headlines which held Israel to account while just 30 were critical of Hamas.
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