On July 2, a story by Lucy Williamson appeared across the BBC website, radio and TV. The story focused on the crisis of healthcare in Gaza, reporting on the plight of those in need of travel to other countries to obtain care. The suffering of these people is real. However, unfortunately, the BBC chose to exploit that suffering in service of a predetermined narrative rather than fully explain the reasons behind it.
This is not fake news. It is true that the healthcare system in Gaza is devastated and there are many people waiting for care and medical evacuations to third countries. However, the BBC’s role in reporting a crisis like this is to provide the facts and crucial context, not to use facts to construct a politicised narrative.
Once again, rather than accurate and impartial reporting we see the BBC engage in misinformation by omission. By reporting human suffering in a military and political vacuum they lead the audience to a singular, false conclusion: that this misery is purely the result of arbitrary Israeli cruelty.
Williamson’s reporting entirely erases Hamas role in the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system. It includes emotive descriptions such as:
“The desperation of patients haunts Gaza’s hospitals – their exterior walls eaten away by gunfire and Israeli strikes, the health-care system inside them still unrepaired.”
She conjured an image of wanton vandalism by Israel that happened in a vacuum and is solely Jerusalem’s responsibility.
However, it is a well-documented fact that Hamas embeds itself in hospitals. In the June 2026 UN Independent Commission report titled “Palestinian civilians are victims of all sides, trapped between the mass atrocities of Israeli forces and settlers and the fear-based rule of Hamas”, the presence of Hamas in Gaza’s hospitals is acknowledged openly and repeatedly. While in February medical NGO Doctors Without Borders suspended its operations in Nasser Hospital because of “reports from patients and its own staff of armed men inside the facility and concerns over the movement of weapons within it”.
None of this is hidden or new information, as even the Palestinian Authority has publicly criticised Hamas’ use of hospitals. As Andrew Fox and Salo Aizenberg wrote in their Henry Jackson Society report into the Hamas Human Shield Strategy:
The exploitation of hospitals by Hamas was well documented before 7 October, particularly at the largest facility in Gaza, Shifa Hospital, which was broadly known to be used by Hamas for military activities. In November 2023, Dave Harden, the former USAID mission director in the West Bank and Gaza and senior humanitarian assistance official in the Obama Administration, commented on his prior experience at the Shifa Hospital. He wrote in an X post that it was “broadly suspected/understood as far back as 2014 that Hamas used the Al Shifa Hospital complex as a command center and base for operations.” 140 He added that “Hamas used ambulances to move its people. This was based on my conversations with the then head of ICRC.
How can a journalist like Lucy Williamson expect audiences to draw an accurate conclusion from her reporting if she fails to inform them why Gaza’s hospitals have been destroyed? The only logical conclusion to be drawn is that Israel has destroyed hospitals intentionally for no reason whatsoever, a conclusion which is both inaccurate and partial.
Williamson’s report gives extensive word count to the issue of medical aid entering the Gaza Strip. However, when presented with hard, verifiable metrics from COGAT detailing the 17,000 tons of specialized medical equipment delivered, the BBC instantly shifts the goalposts.
Rather than holding aid agencies accountable for distribution failures, the reporter relies on an anonymous official to dismiss the data as ‘anecdotal’, applying a total lack of scepticism to an anonymous anti-Israel claim that stands in stark contrast to the aggressive ‘prove it’ standard they uniquely demand from the IDF.
To compound this, Williamson then appeals to the authority of Hamas itself as proof of Israel’s arbitrary cruelty:
Mazen al-Arayeshi, director of engineering and maintenance at Gaza’s ministry of health, said Israel was now allowing enough fuel in to run the generators hospitals rely on for power, but that surgeries were still being cancelled because the power they supplied was too low, and that Israel had refused to allow them to swap in new generators for old.
If spare parts, filters and new generators are not allowed in, we are heading towards a catastrophe,” he told the BBC. “Yesterday, one of the main generators at Nasser Medical Complex [in Khan Younis] stopped working, and we had to cut electricity to several departments.
No evidence is required of a Hamas official, while Israel’s figures are dismissed out of hand.
Hamas is absent from Williamson’s entire narrative. To read her work, an uninformed audience could be forgiven for assuming that Israel is harming civilians and destroying infrastructure in Gaza for fun, rather than being engaged in a complex military operation against a terror organisation deeply embedded within a civilian population.
The fact that not a single civilian would have been harmed were it not for Hamas and its devastating war of choice which it began with the savage October 7 attacks is not even a footnote.
Another actor totally absent from the narrative is Egypt. There have, astonishingly, been almost no calls for Egypt to open its border and accept large numbers of civilian refugees, as would be the norm in any other conflict.
Instead, the holding of an entire population hostage is entirely normalised, with “Israeli security checks” blamed for the slow progress of applications for medical evacuations from the territory – evacuations which should not be necessary, because the reaction of the international community to the human shield strategy should have been to rescue those people by evacuating them, rather than complicity with their captivity.
In 2014, some 12 years ago, Alan Dershowitz wrote a damning description of the crucial role the media plays in “the dead baby strategy”:
Hamas will once again deploy its dead baby strategy — placing its rocket launchers and tunnel entrances in densely populated areas so that Israel will have to kill civilians in order to attack these military targets. It will reprise this strategy because it always works. It works because Hamas makes it easy for the media to show the dead civilians but difficult to show the rockets and tunnels behind and beneath these civilian human shields.
The result of this one-sided emotional display of dead bodies is outrage against Israel for causing so many civilians deaths and demands for international investigations and prosecutions of Israeli officials and soldiers. Israel wins the war on the ground, while Hamas wins the war of international public opinion. Hamas then regroups and rearms, while Israel suffers permanent reputational damage.
The BBC, by refusing to report on the cynical use of hospitals, the human shield strategy, or the shocking refusal of the international community to evacuate large numbers of civilians from Gaza, is making itself complicit in the dead baby strategy, and thereby only succeeding in guaranteeing one thing – more dead babies.
The BBC has a duty to accuracy and impartiality which they fail to uphold time and time again because of an institutional inability to hold Hamas responsible for their own actions, or even name them as actors at all. In this way they recruit themselves into Hamas’ propaganda strategy and entirely abdicate their responsibility to their audience and licence fee payers.
