BBC chairman Samir Shah and director-general Tim Davie apologized to the British Parliament on 3 March over for including 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazouri in a recent documentary on the impact the Israeli genocide has had on Gaza’s children.

“This is a really, really bad moment,” Shah told MPs. “What has been revealed is a dagger to the heart of the BBC’s claim to be impartial and to be trustworthy, which is why I and the board are determined to ask the questions.”

The Indian-born British executive said he believed “people weren’t doing their job.”

For his part, Davie acknowledged a “serious failing” in the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone but said the BBC remained “highly trusted overall” and claimed that independent production company Hoyo Films obscured Yazouri's “possible family links to Hamas.”

Last month, the BBC pulled the documentary from its streaming platform, iPlayer, after an intense campaign by pro-Israel groups and rival media outlets over the inclusion of Yazouri, whose father, Dr Ayman al-Yazouri, served as Gaza’s deputy agriculture minister before the British-sponsored Israeli genocide.

“The narrator of this film is 13-year-old Abdullah. His father has worked as a deputy agriculture minister for the Hamas-run government in Gaza. The production team had full editorial control of filming with Abdullah,” an opening credit read before the film was pulled entirely.

Despite the accusations from pro-Israel groups, the elder Yazouri was a technocrat with a scientific background, not a political one. He had previously worked for the UAE’s Education Ministry and studied at British universities.

“If anything happens to me, the BBC is responsible,” the 13-year-old Palestinian boy told Middle East Eye (MEE) on Wednesday.

“I’ve been working for over nine months on this documentary for it to just get wiped and deleted … it was very sad to me,” Abdullah said.

“It was pretty disappointing and sad to see this backlash against me and my family, and this harassment,” he continued, adding: “Some anonymous people, let’s say, had tried to hide the true suffering of Gaza’s children by attacking me and my family.”

Tuesday's apologies in parliament by Shah and Davie came just days after over 1,000 film, TV, and media workers signed a public letter condemning BBC executives for “racism” and “censorship.”

“As industry professionals who craft stories for the British public, including for the BBC, we condemn the weaponization of a child’s identity and the racist insinuation that Palestinian narratives must be scrutinized through a lens of suspicion,” the letter reads.

“Conflating such governance roles in Gaza with terrorism is both factually incorrect and dehumanizing. This broad-brush rhetoric assumes that Palestinians holding administrative roles are inherently complicit in violence – a racist trope that denies individuals their humanity and right to share their lived experiences,” the letter stresses.

https://thecradle.co/articles/bbc-chair-says-inclusion-of-13-year-old-abdullah-al-yazouri-in-gaza-film-a-really-bad-momen

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