Born in Bias: BBC Filmmakers Create Narrative on Suffering Women and Children

On January 19^th BBC Global Eye from the BBC World Service, aired a “special report from the BBC Eye team who spent a year at the Holy Family Hospital in Bethlehem”. What followed was an exercise in careful narrative construction posing as objective investigative journalism, the reasons for which become clear when the credits roll.

There are two versions of this film. The edit available on BBC iPlayer, and the full, hour-long documentary Born in Bethlehem available on YouTube.

The film opens with women outside the hospital, sirens blaring and missiles visible in the sky. In the BBC iPlayer edit, captions over the missiles inform the audience:

“This film follows staff and mothers over one year from October 2024. It was made against the background of the war in Gaza that followed the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.”

The framing explicitly creates the image that the hospital is under attack from Israel, when in reality what is visible in the sky is an attack on Israeli civilians being defended against by Israeli air defence systems. In the full version on YouTube, viewers are told that the missiles might possibly be from Iran, but it is disputed:

Dr Dana Amro: “They say they’re from Iran, but we’re not sure. They go into people’s homes, or they fire tear gas. It all puts stress on the mother, and sometimes this stress can cause a miscarriage. [to patient] “Sorry, there’s nothing there”

A tragic miscarriage during an indiscriminate attack on civilians by the Islamic Regime is framed as Israel’s fault, and this sets the tone for the entire film.

In another section cut from the BBC iPlayer version of the film, the audience is led to believe that Israel protects civilians on racial lines:

Dr Dana Amro: “Did you hear the rockets as well? The doors were rattling the kids were crying. The rockets flew right over the house. We get these messages, emergency alarm, it says everyone needs to hide in the shelters, there are missiles. But only people with an Israeli SIM card get that message if you have a Palestinian number, you don’t… Only the settlements around Bethlehem have sirens. We don’t have any.”

The film does not clarify that Bethlehem is in Area A and fully under the civil control of the Palestinian Authority. The question as to why the Palestinian Authority does not protect its own civilians while Israel does is not addressed, Israel’s culpability is absolute, even for the protection of people who are not its citizens.

The pattern of blame continues throughout. In the BBC iPlayer edit we meet Amani, a mother whose twins were born at 27 weeks. Her baby boy does not survive, and her daughter is in a serious condition. This is a terribly sad situation which repeats itself in neonatal wards all over the world, but in Bethlehem, it is framed as being Israel’s fault:

Renad Salah: “Today I found out it’s a boy, I feel like it’ll be a challenge for me as a feminist, to raise a boy is a challenge in many ways, honestly, every one of us growing up in this situation in Palestine, men and women we have to ask ourselves: Do I really want my child to be born into this terrible life? In spite of all this we’ve decided to bring another Palestinian child into this world. I mean, it’s our right to keep going”

Amani Hamdan: “I was waiting for God to give me one baby, but he blessed me with two. I gave birth in my 7^th month, at 27 weeks. I was afraid that something was wrong with them or that they weren’t fully formed because they were premature. I asked if something was wrong, I asked if the boy had died, they said they were sorry for my loss. The boy had died. His heart had stopped. In the end I have to be strong. God took one but he left me the other I have to be strong for her. Matil, she holds my hand, it gives me so much happiness.”

There’s no direct suggestion that Amani’s son died because of Israel, but the positioning, the framing, the shots and the language are all carefully chosen to give this impression.

In a final example, while out with the mobile maternity clinic, we meet Khuloud, a seven-month pregnant mother of five, whose husband has been brutally murdered by his own cousins.

Khuloud: “It’s been two weeks and two days. He went out to drive his niece to Abha. They ambushed him. They shot him 3 times, then they shot him in the car, they broke the car then they dragged him out onto the ground, and they started beating his head with an axe… My brother-in-law came and told me that Omar had been killed by his cousins. They’re Arabs, one of us, cousins. It was about water, his brother wanted to water the crops, and they fought about the water. Water in Kisan is scarce. The settlers have taken control of the main water supply”

Even when Palestinians kill their own people, it must of course be blamed on Israel. Khuloud’s story, while arguably the most powerful and tragic in the film, is omitted in its entirety from the BBC iPlayer edit. In that version, true to the BBC’s pattern of erasing Palestinian violence, we never meet her at all.

Pregnancy and birth during war is powerful and universal. The BBC chose to focus on these stories from women in Judea and Samaria while ignoring the Israeli women also struggling through pregnancy and birth against the backdrop of this war, like Serena Kalish, who according to the Jerusalem Post gave birth at the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre “as missiles were intercepted overhead” or Tzeela Gez, shot and murdered by a Palestinian Terrorist while on her way to give birth to her fourth child, who also later died. Not to mention the countless women who have given birth in safe rooms and bunkers including during the direct hit on Soroka Hospital, or whose husbands have been away fighting or taken hostage.

The truth is that women and children suffer in all wars, and the BBC’s decision to focus solely on one side while ascribing all blame to the other misses an opportunity to address one of the truly universal experiences of this conflict.

However, when we arrive at the credits, the reason this “investigative documentary” became an exercise in narrative construction becomes clear. It was produced by Tamara Abu Laban, a Palestinian filmmaker who describes the first intifada as “one of (the) golden phases of the Palestinian resistance” and had this to say about October 7^th in an academic paper on the use of TikTok to spread the Palestinian narrative:

“In the context of the recent Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip, which resulted from the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation—a response to Israeli violations in the Al-Aqsa Mosque and continuous settler assaults on Palestinian citizens in Jerusalem, West Bank cities, and the occupied interior—the Palestinian resistance launched thousands of rockets towards Israeli settlements. Additionally, there were air, land, and sea incursions by resistance fighters into towns adjacent to the Gaza Strip, known as the “Gaza Envelope.” The resistance managed to take control of several military sites, capture a number of soldiers, and seize a collection of Israeli military vehicles. As a result of the initiation of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation, the Israeli occupation state resorted to a scorched-earth policy, initiating intense bombing on the Gaza Strip and launching military attacks. The Israeli Defense Minister issued an order to impose a complete blockade on the Strip, preventing the entry of water, electricity, and food, exacerbating the humanitarian situation, and making it difficult to care for the wounded in this war. Despite these violations, the Israeli occupation state also sought to win the propaganda and media battle by leveraging social media platforms to manage its digital propaganda, disseminate its narrative, and wage psychological warfare. Additionally, it aimed to spread false and misleading news through Facebook to distort the Palestinian narrative and promote claims of violations by Al-Qassam Brigades, alleging inhumane treatment of Israeli women, children, and the elderly to justify its war crimes under the guise of defending its citizens.”

The decision to commission work from a filmmaker who glorifies the Palestinian “resistance”, refers to the State of Israel as “the occupied interior” and denies the atrocities of October 7th is a profoundly concerning one for the BBC, especially given recent high profile failures such as the “How to Survive a War Zone” documentary, but what is perhaps worse is that Tamara Abu Laban’s name is erased from the credits on BBC iPlayer. There, the film is only credited Jeremy Bristow, whose 2019 work on the Holy Family Hospital CAMERA had cause to report on at the time, and director Jess Kelly.

Jess Kelly is a BBC Arabic film director whose recent film Palestine Underground was celebrated by Electronic Intifada as an invigorating portrait of “a new era of resistance”. Within the first two minutes of Palestine Underground the audience is told that the Israeli state is built on Palestinian land, and that the “status” of the “Zionist state” has been disputed since 1948 “since several religions make ancestral claims to the land”, and Kelly refers to Israel throughout as “Occupied Palestine” making clear her position on the existence of the Jewish state.

When the BBC chooses to commission work from filmmakers who openly celebrate violence, deny atrocities and seek to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel’s very existence through their work, they cannot claim to be producing objective, impartial and unbiased programming. Which is why, instead of a powerful and moving film on the struggles of pregnancy and motherhood in war, they have instead aired a carefully constructed attack on the state of Israel.