A stark new article from the BBC is surprisingly frank in its portrayal of Israel of a nation which is openly violating the Geneva Convention. Clearly, this is another sign that the the tide is turning on Israel and its supporters in the West. Beyond that, it’s an inadvertent admission of what many of us already knew; that the BBC has known what’s going on all along.

The section which proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt is the article’s ending:

I keep thinking about something an Israeli officer said the only time I’ve been into Gaza since the war started. I spent a few hours in the ruins with the Israeli army, one month into the war, when it had already made northern Gaza into a wasteland

He started telling me how they did their best to not to fire on Palestinian civilians. Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.

Just imagine if the BBC had focussed on this clear genocidal intent instead of the Israeli government’s lies and spin.

The BBC: ‘even wars have rules’

The piece from international editor Jeremy Bowen is titled as follows:

Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes – how governments respond could haunt them for years to come

It begins with a statement which is obvious to most of us:

Even wars have rules. They don’t stop soldiers killing each other but they’re intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides.

If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan.

The BBC would have to present this as uncommon knowledge, because they’ve spent so much of the past 20 months giving air time to people who argue that Israel can do what it likes in response to the October 2023 attack.

Author Jeremy Bowen ends his intro with the following (emphasis added):

At the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) the words “Even Wars Have Rules” are emblazoned in huge letters on a glass rotunda.

The reminder is timely because the rules are being broken.

You could call this article from the BBC a lot of things, but timely is not one of them.

Israel’s war on journalism

Bowen goes on to talk about how hostile to journalism Israel is:

Getting information from Gaza is difficult. It is a lethal warzone. At least 181 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war started, almost all Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel won’t let international news teams into Gaza.

Since the best way to check controversial and difficult stories is first hand, that means the fog of war, always hard to penetrate, is as thick as I have ever experienced in a lifetime of war reporting.

It is clear that Israel wants it to be that way. A few days into the war I was part of a convoy of journalists escorted by the army into the border communities that Hamas had attacked, while rescue workers were recovering the bodies of Israelis from smoking ruins of their homes, and Israeli paratroopers were still clearing buildings with bursts of gunfire.

Israel wanted us to see what Hamas had done. The conclusion has to be that it does not want foreign reporters to see what it is doing in Gaza.

This is the sort of reporting we should have seen from the BBC all along, but it does leave some things out. One thing of note is that this hasn’t simply been “difficult” for journalists, as Al Jazeera reports:

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed 232 journalists – an average of 13 per month – making it the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded, according to a report by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ Costs of War project.

More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia and the United States war in Afghanistan combined, the report published on Tuesday found.

“It is, quite simply, the worst ever conflict for reporters,” the analysis said.

It’s worse than just deadly, too, with Al Jazeera publishing allegations that Israel has deliberately targetted journalists:

The report explained it was unclear how many Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been specifically targeted by Israeli attacks and “how many were simply the victims, like tens of thousands of fellow civilians, of Israel’s bombardment”.

However, it cites the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) as documenting 35 cases where Israel’s military likely targeted and killed journalists because of their work by the end of 2024.

Among them was Al Jazeera reporter Hamza Dahdouh, who was killed on January 7, 2024 when a missile struck the vehicle he was travelling in in southern Gaza. He was the fifth immediate family member of Wael Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, to be killed by Israeli attacks.

Why were so many journalists in the West comfortable to ignore the targetted elimination of their Palestinian peers?

That’s a question we hope they’ll one day have to answer.

Why this admission from the BBC now?

The article quickly tells on itself as to why the Western establishment is suddenly asking questions of Israel (emphasis added):

To find an alternative route through that [fog of war], we decided to approach it through the prism of laws that are supposed to regulate warfare and protect civilians. I went to the ICRC headquarters as it is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions.

I have also spoken to distinguished lawyers; to humanitarians with years of experience of working within the law to bring aid to Gaza and other warzones; and to senior Western diplomats about their governments’ growing impatience with Israel and nervousness that they might be seen as complicit in future criminal investigations if they do not speak up about the catastrophe inside Gaza.

The first paragraph suggests it’s been impossible to report on the conflict, which is funny because outlets like The Canary, Declassified UK, Al Jazeera, and others have managed just fine.

Bowen is suggesting he’s had to be clever to get to the bottom of things, but it’s the second paragraph which highlights what’s actually going on. Politicians and media figures are waking up to the reality that unlike in previous assaults, Israel may not stop this time.

We may be watching its final solution on the Palestinian people unfold in realtime, and when it’s over, all those who supported Israeli propaganda will be judged. Whether they’re judged in the court of public opinion or the Hague remains to be seen, but one things is clear; the BBC has been a key purveyor of Israel’s narratives.

Benjamin Netanyahu

While there’s a lot more you could say about Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu, this passage does at least show him up for the crooked and amoral chancer he is:

In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power.

As prime minister he can prevent a national inquiry into his role in security failures that gave Hamas its opportunity before 7 October and slow down his long-running trial on serious corruption charges that could land him in jail.

This next passage demonstrates Netanyahu’s victim complex:

Rival politicians inside Israel accuse Netanyahu of presiding over war crimes and turning Israel into a pariah state.

He has pushed back hard, comparing himself – when the warrant was issued – to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason in an antisemitic scandal that rocked France in the 1890s.

If there’s a problem with this section – and there is – it’s that it puts too much emphasis on Netanyahu as an individual; it also suggests a level of opposition to him which simply isn’t there. Israel was oppressing Palestine long before Netanyahu took power, and polling within the country shows broad support for ethnically cleansing Gaza. The horrors didn’t start with Netanyahu and they won’t stop with him either.

It’s important to point out what’s being said here, because there are many Western supporters of Israel who have moved from ‘what Israel is doing is fine’ to ‘what Netanyahu is doing is wrong’; a shift which allows them to continue supporting the broader Zionist project of maintaining a colonialist ethnostate in the Middle East without feeling uncomfortable about the overt barbarism that’s currently on display.

The many dead

Bowen covers the high casualty rate for Palestinians, as well as Israel’s efforts to suppress this information:

The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year. Its figures do not separate civilians from members of Hamas and other armed groups.

According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.

Israel and the US have tried to spread doubt about the casualty reports from the ministry, because like the rest of the fragments of governance left in Gaza, it is controlled by Hamas. But the ministry’s figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country’s own intelligence services.

Bowen also touches on the fact that much higher estimates exist:

A study in medical journal The Lancet argues that the ministry underestimates the numbers killed by Israel, in part because its figures are incomplete. Thousands are buried under rubble of destroyed buildings and thousands more will die slowly of illnesses that would have been curable had they had access to medical care.

What he doesn’t do is highlight just how high some of these alternatives are. The Lancet study in question is presumably the one which was published in January of this year, with France 24 reporting:

A study in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that 64,260 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, which would mean the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip had under-reported the number of deaths to that point by 41 percent.

An earlier study published by the Lancet found the following, as reported by Al Jazeera:

The accumulative effects of Israel’s war on Gaza could mean the true death toll could reach more than 186,000 people, according to a study published in the journal Lancet.

The outlet further expanded on the study’s reasoning:

“In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths,” it said.

After applying a “conservative estimate” of four indirect deaths per one direct death, “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable” to the Gaza war, the study found.

Such a number would represent almost 8 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.3 million.

The Lancet study noted that Israeli intelligence services, the UN and the World Health Organization all agree that claims of data fabrication levelled against the Palestinian authorities in Gaza over its death toll are “implausible”.

It pointed out that the toll is likely much higher because the destruction of infrastructure in Gaza has made it extremely difficult to maintain a count that is not lower than the actual death toll.

Starvation as a weapon

The recent shift against Israel seems to have happened because Israel has more openly deployed starvation as a means of warfare. While this is far from a new phenomenon, the fact that it’s become more pronounced has caused widespread revulsion among the public. While many of us rightfully view Israel’s bombing campaigns as equally genocidal, it’s sadly the case that more people can kid themselves into thinking this sort of violence is acceptable to get at the ‘bad guys’ (in this instance the Hamas fighters which Israel alleges are hidden beneath the hospitals and schools it blows up).

Speaking on the weaponisation of famine, Bowen reports:

Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved.

A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger “as a weapon of war”. The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a “main pressure lever” against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat.

Weaponising food is a war crime.

It’s good that the BBC is stating it this bluntly, and that it acknowledges that this has happened “throughout the war”. Again, though, groups like Human Rights Watch were reporting on this as early as 2023:

“For over two months, Israel has been depriving Gaza’s population of food and water, a policy spurred on or endorsed by high-ranking Israeli officials and reflecting an intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “World leaders should be speaking out against this abhorrent war crime, which has devastating effects on Gaza’s population.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed 11 displaced Palestinians in Gaza between November 24 and December 4. They described their profound hardships in securing basic necessities. “We had no food, no electricity, no internet, nothing at all,” said one man who had left northern Gaza. “We don’t know how we survived.”

Famously, our current prime minister Keir Starmer backed Israel’s right to ‘cut off water and energy’ at the time (before later rowing back the comments when he realised he was condoning a war crime).

There’s one more thing to note, however, and that’s that Israel was weaponising hunger and poverty far before 2023, as reported in the Conversation:

But as much as things have worsened in the past 18 months, food insecurity in Gaza and the mechanisms that enable it did not start with Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.

A U.N. report from 2022 found that 65% of people in Gaza were food insecure, defined as lacking regular access to enough safe and nutritious food.

Multiple factors contributed to this preexisting food insecurity, not least the blockade of Gaza imposed by Israel and enabled by Egypt since 2007. All items entering the Gaza Strip, including food, became subject to Israeli inspection, delay or denial.

Basic foodstuff was allowed, but because of delays at the border, it could spoil before it entered Gaza.

A 2009 investigation by Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz found that foods as varied as cherries, kiwi, almonds, pomegranates and chocolate were prohibited entirely.

At certain points, the blockade, which Israel claimed was an unavoidable security measure, has been loosened to allow import of more foods. In 2010, for example, Israel started to permit potato chips, fruit juices, Coca-Cola and cookies.

By placing restrictions on food imports, Israel has claimed to be trying to put pressure on Hamas by making life difficult for the people in Gaza. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” said one Israeli government adviser in 2006.

To enable this, the Israeli government commissioned a 2008 study to work out exactly how many calories Palestinians would need to avoid malnutrition. The report was released to the public only following a 2012 legal battle. Echoes of this sentiment can be seen in the Israeli decision in May 2025 to allow only “the basic amount of food” to reach Gaza to purportedly ensure “no starvation crisis develops.”

The long-running blockade also increased food insecurity by preventing meaningful development of an economy in Gaza.

Desperate and hungry people do desperate and unpredictable things; especially when their efforts to protest peacefully are murderously suppressed, as they were during the peaceful 2018 March of Great Return.

This is what Amnesty said of that protest back in 2018:

More than six months have passed since the “Great March of Return” protests started in the Gaza Strip on 30 March.
Their calls for Israeli authorities to lift their 11-year illegal blockade on Gaza and to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their villages and towns have not been met.
According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, since the start of the protests, over 150 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations. At least 10,000 others have been injured, including 1,849 children, 424 women, 115 paramedics and 115 journalists. Of those injured, 5,814 were hit by live ammunition.

They added:

Over the last 11 years, civilians in the Gaza Strip, 70% of whom are registered refugees from areas that now constitute Israel, have suffered the devastating consequences of Israel’s illegal blockade in addition to three wars that have also taken a heavy toll on essential infrastructure and further debilitated Gaza’s health system and economy. As a result, Gaza’s economy has sharply declined, leaving its population almost entirely dependent on international aid. Gaza now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world at 44%. Four years after the 2014 conflict, some 22,000 people remain internally displaced, and thousands suffer from significant health problems that require urgent medical treatment outside of the Gaza Strip. However, Israel often denies or delays issuing permits to those seeking vital medical care outside Gaza, while hospitals inside the Strip lack adequate resources and face chronic shortages of fuel, electricity and medical supplies caused mainly by Israel’s illegal blockade.

The protests were launched to demand the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees to their villages and towns in what is now Israel, and to call for an end to Israel’s blockade. They culminated on 14 May, on the day of the US embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, when Palestinians commemorate the displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands in 1948-9 during the conflict following the creation of the state of Israel. On that day alone, Israeli forces killed 59 Palestinians, in a horrifying example of use of excessive force and live ammunition against protesters who did not pose an imminent threat to life.

Rules of war

From this point in the article, Bowen goes even heavier on Israel breaking the ‘rules of war’, interviewing high-level diplomats in the process:

War is always savage. I was in Geneva to see Mirjana Spoljaric, the Swiss diplomat who is president of the ICRC. She believes it can get even worse; that there is no doubt that both parties are flouting the Geneva Conventions, and this sends a message that the rules of war can be ignored in conflicts across the world.

After we walked past glass cases displaying the ICRC’s three Nobel peace prizes and handwritten copperplate reproductions of the Geneva Conventions, she warned that “we are hollowing out the very rules that protect the fundamental rights of every human being”.

The Geneva Conventions are all well and good, but this focus on the rules of war is another way of allowing Israel to maintain some sense of legitimacy. Inherent to this line of thinking is that the issue isn’t the invasion; it’s the improper way in which Israel is waging it.

Why can’t we just say war is bad, and demand that Israel stop?

Israel is entirely reliant on Western weapons and funding after all; without that, the genocide would end tomorrow.

Never again, says the BBC

Grimly, Israel has abused the memory of the Holocaust to pursue its own genocide against the Palestinian people. And thankfully, Bowen’s article touches on that:

British barrister Helena Kennedy KC was on a panel that was asked by the ICC’s chief prosecutor to assess the evidence against Netanyahu and Gallant. Baroness Kennedy and her colleagues, all distinguished jurists, decided that there were reasonable grounds to go ahead with the warrants. She rejects the accusation that the court and the prosecutor were motivated by antisemitism.

“We’ve got to always remember the horrors that the Jewish community have suffered over centuries,” she told me at her chambers in London. “The world is right to feel a great compassion for the Jewish experience.”

But a history of persecution did not, she said, give Israel licence to do what it’s doing in Gaza.

“The Holocaust has filled us all with a high sense of guilt, and so it should because we were complicit. But it also teaches us the lesson that we mustn’t be complicit now when we see crimes being committed.

“You have to conduct a war according to law, and I’m a firm believer that the only way that you ever create peace is by behaving in just ways, and justice is fundamental to all of this. And I’m afraid that we’re not seeing that.”

Stronger words came from Danny Blatman, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust and head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Prof Blatman, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, says that Israeli politicians have for many years used the memory of the Holocaust as “a tool to attack governments and public opinion in the world, and warn them that accusing Israel of any atrocities towards the Palestinians is antisemitism”.

The result he says is that potential critics “shut their mouths because they’re afraid of being attacked by Israelis, by politicians as antisemites”.

Those who have stood against Israel for decades know all this. As such, it’s somewhat shocking to see the BBC reporting it; it was, after all, one of the key vessels Israel used to attack and smear us.

The BBC‘s complicity was particularly apparent when Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour party, as we reported extensively. This next quote is from our coverage of a widely criticised Panorama ‘documentary’:

On 10 July, the BBC‘s Panorama broadcast an hour-long show called Is Labour Antisemitic? The BBC claimed it used “exclusive interviews from key insiders and access to confidential communications” in order to reveal “evasions and contradictions at the heart” of the Labour Party. Yet, a new report documents a “catalogue of reporting failures” against the BBC‘s own editorial guidelines.

Journalist Fréa Lockley further reported:

BBC guidelines note that looking at “a series of programmes” on a topic can establish impartiality. As MRC said, “Panorama has broadcast three editions focused on the Labour Party, all of which have taken an overwhelmingly critical view of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership”. Presenter John Ware’s first show ‘Labour’s Earthquake’, prompted Corbyn’s office to issue a formal complaint calling it a “hatchet job”. Ware is openly critical and has “long declared his opposition” to Corbyn. Neil Grant – who’s also been behind a series of anti-Corbyn programmes – was the executive producer on two Panorama shows. MRC noted:

“Handing two editions to the same presenter with known (and hostile) political views on Corbyn without seeking to offer a counterposing perspective is hardly a ringing endorsement of the BBC’s commitment to due impartiality.”

Panorama failed to document “the overwhelming support” for Corbyn from members. Nor did it show that in 2017, he “led the party in a general election that saw the biggest increase in Labour’s share of the popular vote since 1945”.

As MRC’s chair Natalie Fenton told The Canary:

“How can it be right that two recent editions of Panorama on the Labour Party have been presented by a journalist who has publicly declared his hostility to Jeremy Corbyn?”

The wrong side of history

Towards the end of the piece, Bowen touches on the accusations of genocide – accusations we at The Canary fully agree with:

We asked Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, for his opinion.

“Genocide is a question of intent,” he wrote. “It means killing, maiming or imposing intolerable conditions on a national or ethnic group with intent to destroy them in whole or in part.

“Statements by Netanyahu and his ministers suggest that the object of current operations is to force the Arab population of Gaza to leave by killing and starving them if they stay. These things make genocide the most plausible explanation for what is now happening.”

In articles like this one from Bowen, you can feel the ground shifting beneath us.

It’s obvious to everyone that Israel has created an impossible rift between the image it wants to maintain and the actions it cannot stop itself committing. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of that rift when it’s finished forming. There may be no coming back.

We’re glad to see the BBC has to report some semblance of the truth now, but we’re not going to pretend this is about anything other than self-preservation. We’re also not going to let them get away with rewriting their role in all of this; especially with them admitting that they knew all along:

Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.

Featured image via Tim Loudon (Flickr) – UNRWA (Wikimedia)

By The Canary

This post was originally published on Canary.