The BBC is under fire over its controversial documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone after apparently deliberately mistranslating statements made by interviewees to downplay antisemitic rhetoric and sanitize support for terrorism. The broadcaster has been caught repeatedly altering references to “the Jews” in Arabic to “Israel” or “Israeli forces” in subtitles—fundamentally misrepresenting the words spoken on camera. The Telegraph has exposed at least five instances in which the words Yahud or Yahudy—Arabic terms for “Jew” or “Jews”—were changed to “Israel” or “Israeli forces,” or omitted entirely. Even more egregiously, when an interviewee praised Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar for his “jihad against the Jews,” the BBC subtitles softened the statement to say he was fighting “Israeli forces.” The blatant distortion of language has fueled outrage over the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, with accusations that the broadcaster is whitewashing extremism and shielding its audience from the raw reality of antisemitic incitement in Gaza. This is not the first time the BBC has been caught misrepresenting Arabic-language speech to suit its editorial narrative. In a pattern that has spanned over a decade, the corporation has frequently substituted the word Yahud with “Israelis” in reports about Palestinian perspectives, effectively obscuring the deeply ingrained antisemitism that fuels groups like Hamas. In the Gaza documentary, multiple mistranslations significantly altered the meaning of statements. Among them: A Gazan woman, describing an Israeli military operation, originally said, “The Jews invaded our area.” The BBC subtitles changed this to: “The Israeli army invaded our area.” A child interviewed about bombings said, “The Jews came, they destroyed us, Hamas and the Jews.” The BBC rephrased this as: “The Israelis destroyed everything, and so did Hamas.” A Palestinian woman speaking about the October 7 Hamas attacks declared: “We were invading the Jews for the first time.” Yet, in the BBC’s version, she was simply “invading Israel.” In a chilling scene where a Palestinian doctor was amputating a child’s arm, he said, “Look what the Jews are doing to the children of Gaza.” The BBC subtitled it as: “Look what the Israelis are doing to the children of Gaza.” These deliberate mistranslations fundamentally distort the film’s narrative, replacing explicit Jew-hatred with a more politically palatable anti-Israel framing—one that conveniently aligns with the BBC’s long-standing anti-Israel bias. Beyond the erasure of antisemitism, the BBC also systematically softened references to jihad. When a Palestinian woman described Sinwar as “engaging in resistance and jihad against the Jews,” the BBC translated it as “resisting Israeli forces.” Even the Arabic word for “jihad” was omitted from subtitles in a clear attempt to downplay the ideological and religious motivations behind Hamas’s war on Israel. This whitewashing is not just a translation issue—it’s a propaganda problem. By airbrushing language that directly calls for violence against Jews, the BBC shields Hamas’s ideology from scrutiny and misleads its audience about the reality on the ground. The revelations about the documentary’s gross misrepresentations come amid mounting pressure on the BBC to disclose whether taxpayer money was funneled to Hamas-linked entities during the film’s production. The BBC initially defended the documentary as an “invaluable testament” to Palestinian experiences but later pulled it from iPlayer under the guise of “further due diligence.” Media watchdogs and Jewish advocacy groups have condemned the broadcaster’s actions, calling them a deliberate obfuscation of truth. Alex […]