BBC’s Shaimaa Khalil avoids facts to promote a narrative

On February 5^th the BBC News website published a filmed report credited to its Tokyo correspondent Shaimaa Khalil titled “Inside Gaza hospital struggling to provide care to newborn babies”. That report was also promoted by the BBC’s Middle East bureau chief and on the Instagram accounts of BBC News and BBC Global Women.

The synopsis to Khalil’s report tells BBC audiences that:

“The director of one of Gaza’s main hospitals says he is still seeing a pattern of malnourished and traumatised mothers giving birth to underweight or premature babies, more than three months into a fragile ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

Although significantly more aid has been allowed into Gaza since the ceasefire began, the UN says it is still nowhere near enough.

Israel says it is meeting its obligations under the ceasefire, allowing more food and medical aid into Gaza.

Shaimaa Khalil reports.”

Viewers are not informed who did the filming or who facilitated the interviews promoted in Khalil’s report. Neither are they provided with any context concerning the October 7^th 2023 attacks that sparked “this conflict” before Khalil tells viewers that:

Khalil: “In this maternity hospital in Gaza City, families who’ve endured bombing, displacement and hunger wait anxiously, hoping that their babies will survive being born into this conflict. Dr. Naim Ayoub says his hospital has had to compensate for a collapsed health system across northern Gaza. The flow of aid into the Strip has been scaled up in recent months following the ceasefire but he sees a prevailing pattern: malnourished, traumatised mothers giving birth to underweight or premature babies.”

Ayoub [voiceover translation]: “Many babies do not survive. We’ve seen numerous miscarriages and premature deliveries. Those who make it are [unintelligible] and frail, underdeveloped and underweight, often less that two kilos. These women were surrounded by bombing and airstrikes and by the debris and toxic residue they leave behind.”

Khalil: “25-year-old Suha Khader is a widowed mother of five. She’s left southern Gaza after being displaced in al-Mawasi camp and is now sheltering much further north in Gaza City. Eight months pregnant, she’s one of thousands of expectant mothers with little access to healthcare and almost no proper nutrition.” [emphasis in the original]

Khader [voiceover translation]: “I would get very dizzy. Sometimes I bled because of malnutrition. I’ve been so frightened during this pregnancy because of the bombing and because we keep fleeing. I look at my five little boys and these awful circumstances and at one point I wished this pregnancy would not continue. But by the grace of God, I am still pregnant.”

Khalil: “Only recently did Suha see a doctor – just once. She’s expecting a baby girl.”

Khader [voiceover translation]: “There will be no food for her. No formula, no clothing. It’s a terrible feeling knowing you cannot provide for your child, sitting here in this cold tent.”

Khalil: “Many pregnant women now walk for hours just to reach the occasional appointment. Repeated displacement has scarred their lives and those of their unborn babies.”

By this stage, viewers are two minutes and five seconds into Khalil’s emotional report that completely fails to provide any empirical data. Viewers then hear seven seconds of BBC impartiality box-ticking:

Khalil: “Israel says it’s meeting its obligations under the ceasefire, facilitating an increased flow of food and medical supplies into Gaza.”

That, however, is followed by Khalil’s closing messaging:

Khalil: “But aid agencies and the UN dispute this claim”.

Khalil does not bother to tell BBC audiences that the UN sends only around 20% of the aid entering the Gaza Strip or that on January 5^th 2026 it put out a statement headlined “Gaza: 100 per cent of basic food needs met for first time since 2023”.

Since the ceasefire came into effect in October 2025, between 600 and 800 trucks of aid have entered the Gaza Strip daily – 4,200 trucks a week – with 70% of them carrying food.

In June 2025 the UN quoted a simulation stating that 120 trucks of food aid per day were needed to meet the nutritional needs of the entire population of the Gaza Strip. Other UN assessments have cited the numbers 103 and 134 trucks per day while the BBC itself spent months serially promoting the inflated “500 trucks” claim.

In other words, there is no evidence to justify Khalil’s uncritical amplification of claims from “aid agencies and the UN” disputing the increase in the amounts of aid supplied to the Gaza Strip.

If, as claimed in this report, pregnant women in the Gaza Strip are suffering from a lack of food nearly four months after the ceasefire came into effect and aid deliveries were augmented to provide amounts that far exceed the defined requirements, the BBC should surely be investigating why that is the case.

Khalil and her colleagues could have begun by asking their “sources inside Gaza”, who in July 2025 confirmed that Hamas “took control” of donated aid, whether that theft of free food supplies continues.

Instead, Shaimaa Khalil preferred to promote false allegations concerning Israel’s adherence to the terms of the ceasefire agreement in order to promote a politically motivated narrative.