Back in December 2023 the BBC News website published a report based primarily on an interview with the director of a hospital (named after a terrorist) in Rafah.
Titled “Gaza doctor says lack of medicine is ‘catastrophic’ as diseases spread” and credited to BBC Arabic’s Adnan El-Bursh, who was still in the Gaza Strip at the time, that report opens by telling BBC audiences that:
“”The situation in the Gaza Strip and especially in Rafah is deadly.”
Dr Marwan al-Hams is the director of Rafah’s Martyr Mohammed Yusuf al-Najjar Hospital, which has 63 beds but is currently caring for 145 patients.
The hospital is operating at more than twice its capacity because Rafah, which lies on the border with Egypt, is now home to about one million displaced Palestinians, on top of the pre-war population of 300,000.
“The lack of medicine is catastrophic and there is no space in hospitals,” Dr Hams told the BBC.”
The rest of that report includes the promotion of multiple claims made by Dr Marwan al-Hams, with no further elaboration on that description of him as al-Najjar hospital’s director.
In February 2024 that same photograph appeared in a report credited to Alice Cuddy and Muath Al Khatib titled “Gaza doctors: ‘We leave patients to scream for hours and hours’”.
There too, Dr al-Hams is described as the hospital’s director:
“Other doctors from across the Gaza Strip described similar situations. “Even if there is somebody with cardiac arrest or cardiac problems, we put them on the floor and start to work on them,” said Dr Marwan al-Hams, director of Rafah’s Martyr Mohammed Yusuf al-Najjar Hospital.”
Notably, that paragraph is followed by this opaque statement:
“A Hamas political committee appoints directors of public hospitals in Gaza. In some cases, these directors were in place before Hamas took control of the Strip.”
In July 2025 David Gritten was able to tell readers of a report tiled “WHO condemns Israeli attacks on facilities in central Gaza” that Dr al-Hams was “a senior official in Gaza’s health ministry”.
“On Monday, one freelance photojournalist, Tamer al-Zaanin, was killed and another freelance photojournalist, Ibrahim Abu Ushaibeh, was injured when Israeli special forces detained a senior official in Gaza’s health ministry, Dr Marwan al-Hams, according to Nasser hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis.
The two journalists were reportedly interviewing Dr Hams outside a field hospital run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Rafah area at the time of the incident.
The health ministry cited witnesses as saying that Dr Hams sustained a foot injury while being detained and expressed deep concern for his health in Israeli custody.
The ICRC confirmed it treated casualties from the incident but did not comment further on their status. The Israeli military has also not yet commented.”
Four months later, on November 20th, the “Israeli military” did comment on that story.
“A Hamas operative with knowledge of where the terror group was holding the body of Lt. Hadar Goldin in the Gaza Strip was captured by Israeli forces in a special operation in July, the IDF and Shin Bet reveal.
Dr. Marwan al-Hams — who is the head of the Gaza Strip’s field hospitals, a position within the Hamas-run health ministry — was nabbed by undercover Israeli forces on July 21 in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, while he was visiting a Red Cross hospital in the area.
According to the IDF and Shin Bet, al-Hams was “involved in declaring the death” of Goldin following his abduction in the 2014 Gaza War, and “is suspected of knowing where he was buried” in the major Hamas tunnel in the Rafah area.”
In other words, the doctor from whom BBC audiences learned about alleged communicable diseases and food poisoning in December 2023 and patients being treated on the floor in February 2024 was at the time not only the director of al-Najjar hospital but also a Hamas operative and – according to the Palestinian NGO PCHR – also “the official assigned to oversee field hospitals in the Gaza Strip as well as Spokesperson of the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MOH)”.
It is of course very difficult to believe that neither Adnan El-Bursh (with over 20 years of reporting experience in the Gaza Strip) nor Muath al-Khatib were aware of the fact that the interviewee featured in their reports was not only a hospital director as stated but also a member of the Hamas terrorist organisation and a spokesman for its health ministry. Nevertheless, BBC audiences were not provided with that vital information which would of course have helped them put the doctor’s claims and allegations into context.
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