‘When the only journalists are being slaughtered...’

ON 7 JULY London Freelance Branch held a meeting in parliament, sponsored by John McDonnell MP. The meeting was organised as a teach-in for our members to examine the ethics and realities of reporting the genocide in Gaza.

From left: Chair Pennie Quinton; Ben de Pear; John McDonnell MP; Menna Hijazi; and Pete Chonka

Image © Mike Holderness

Ben de Pear is a former Editor of Channel 4 News and founder of the production company Basement Films – that produced the award-winning documentary Kill Zone: inside Gaza and Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. The latter was originally commissioned by the BBC. Ben spoke about the refusal of BBC senior management to broadcast Gaza: Doctors Under Attack even after, he said, BBC staff and legal teams had approved it.

Palestinian law graduate Menna Hijazi is from Gaza City and worked as an associate producer on both films. She shared some of the horrific working realities faced by the journalists in Gaza who had contributed to Basement’s two documentaries.

Pete Chonka is a senior lecturer in Digital Humanities at King’s College London and formerly an interpreter and reporter for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Somalia – previously considered the most dangerous conflict in the world for journalists. He also joined us in his role as vice chair of King’s College London’s University and College Union (UCU) branch, and spoke about the threats to academic freedom that the genocide in Gaza has exposed.

Mariam Elsayeh is London Freelance Branch training officer and an NUJ ethics council member. She stood in at the last minute after another speaker could not attend, and highlighted the impact of Gaza on press freedom in the UK and the lack of mainstream coverage of the huge demonstrations held in solidarity with the people of Gaza that have filled the streets of Britain since 2023 – an omission which, she said, showed the serious flaws in the reporting of Gaza at a national level.

The meeting opened with a welcome from John McDonnell, who asked us to observe a minute’s silence to remember those killed in London twenty years previously, on 7 July 2005, as well as all those we have lost in Gaza.

Ben de Pear began the teach-in by responding to a key demand often expressed by the NUJ and the BBC: that Western journalists, or non-Palestinian journalists, be allowed into Gaza. This, Ben said, had become a diversion from the fact that there are “hundreds of brilliant Palestinian journalists in Gaza,” he said.

“I do think journalists should be allowed in, and the reason they're not being allowed in is because the death, the killing in Gaza is so absolute that Israel wants to act with impunity.”

Ben has worked in Gaza for months at a time, over many years. He was a producer for Sky News in Jerusalem in 2002. “I've been in Gaza about a dozen times, and I've always relied on Gazan journalists to tell me what the hell is going on. Obviously, we'd all love to see Jeremy Bowen or Lindsey Hilsum in Gaza. But I don't think their reporting would be possible without the Palestinian journalists there.

“One of the things that's happened, particularly with the BBC in its reporting of Gaza, is that they keep saying: ‘the BBC is not allowed to enter Gaza, we can't report independently, we need access’…

“The BBC won’t use agency journalists like the people who work for Reuters, AP, AFP, the internationally recognised agencies.

“A very good friend of mine is Palestinian, he's a brilliant journalist, a much better journalist than I've ever been. He understands Gaza better than Jeremy Bowen will ever do. But the BBC is not using him.

“I was a foreign journalist for quite a long time, and I realised that Britain had enough people from Somalia, from Pakistan: why were we sending British reporters to places where they didn't understand where they were, or who to talk to? So we started to rely on people from those places, and to demand that journalists are treated as equals wherever they are.

“I’m proud of what Channel 4 News has done in the last two years… not always, but consistently, I think they've been the best of the rest. But the BBC, which is the most important broadcaster in this country, and perhaps the world, has really reduced itself to a joke on this issue. And one part of that is its inability to allow Palestinians to report on the killing of their families. I find, this a stage one of the failure of its reporting.

“When I was in Jerusalem as a young producer for Sky News, I was constantly having a back-and-forth with the likes of Mark Regev [who became Israel's ambassador to the UK from 2016 to 2020] and Ehud Olmert [former prime minister of Israel], who was then the mayor of Jerusalem. They would call me up and I would meet with them, and I would have vigorous debates with them and we wouldn't change anything that we put out…

“I think now there is a difference, in that the influence that the Israeli state now has goes from the very top… it cascades down to everybody who's working at the BBC now. I say this as someone who's worked within the BBC for the last year: it is absolutely paralysed by fear. A fear from their bosses that they may cross certain lines…

“They dropped the film months ago; they were never going to run it, because they were finding what it showed deeply shocking.

“BBC people said to me at one stage that they didn't trust the United Nations as an independent body – that it can’t be trusted any more. I wrote it down. They said, 'Why are you writing it down?'

“I said, 'Because when you drop this film, that will be the first line of my newspaper article.' I then searched on my laptop and said, 'Here are a dozen UN reports that you have on your website.' I said, 'I think what you mean is that Israel thinks that the UN is not independent,' and they said 'you might be right.'

“It’s so embedded in their heads, what the Israeli government thinks, and they are so worried about it... not all of them. I worked with some very brilliant journalists, there are very many brilliant journalists at the BBC, but many people believe that the Israeli opinion of the policy is the BBC opinion of the policy.

“I've been there; I've made mistakes at Channel 4 News; but it's never the mistake you make, it's the cover-up. At the BBC Tim Davies [director-general] is a PR man. He used to do the 'Pepsi Challenge;' or whatever in a previous job.

“I still trust the majority of what the BBC says, and it's a very important institution, and I don't think it should be de-funded, unless this current management stays in place. They've got to get rid of these guys.”

Menna Hijazi told us that “on the first day of working at Basement Films in London, a colleague showed me a Tweet from the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, celebrating the 'successful' bombing of Hamas targets in Gaza. The footage was an aerial shot of a neighbourhood being flattened by bombs. I immediately recognised my neighbourhood, and I could see the exact block of flats where I grew up going up in fire and smoke.

“Growing up, I never imagined that I would one day be involved with documenting the destruction of my home and the erasure of my people.

“For me, this neighbourhood was full of family and friends who worked as doctors, lawyers, teachers, and humanitarian workers – including my mother, who worked for the UN for 15 years, with the psychosocial support unit. Thankfully, I was a student in the UK at the time, and my family escaped the building minutes before it was bombed.

“Sadly, many people I knew, and tens of thousands of Gazans, have not been so lucky. This includes a shocking number of journalists. The latest UN figures total over 200 journalists killed while reporting, making Gaza by far the deadliest workplace for journalists in the twenty-first century.”

Menna shared with us two personal stories of people she had worked with while producing Gaza: Doctors Under Attack that demonstrated some of the challenges of what it means to be a journalist in Gaza.

She described how Basement’s producer on the ground in Gaza is married with three little boys, for whom he is the sole breadwinner. Every day he leaves for work and he worries he may not come back home to find his family still alive; or that he will be killed in the field and won’t make it back home, leaving his family without support. The realities of war mean his work is a daily risk. Menna recalled that “one day, I asked if it was safe for him to leave his home, as the Israeli army was operating nearby.”

He told Menna: “we want the world to hear our voices and stories before they disappear under the rubble.

“In the middle of making our documentary, he left one day to find his equipment, along with that of many other journalists, destroyed by an Israeli bomb. Under genocide, journalists as well as cameras and microphones are targeted.”

Menna then told us a story that illustrates the horrors and complexity of reporting the truth in Gaza. The orthopaedic surgeon Adnan al-Bursh was abducted by the Israeli army when they invaded the hospital where he worked. He was eventually taken to Ofer prison where he was killed. It came to light that Adnan was assaulted and raped by Israeli prison officers before he was killed.

Back in Gaza, cut off from the internet, Adnan’s wife Yasmin was for months in the dark about the fate of her husband. Menna said that it was only because of their efforts at Basement Films that they eventually reached Yasmin to tell her the horrific news of her husband’s rape and murder.

She told us that sometimes the reality of reporting on Gaza means that “we in the UK are the only source of truth” for the victims of this genocide and their families. Covering up, denying, and censoring this information can therefore prevent the truth from being told not only to the world, but to Gazans themselves who live in an information blackout.

Pete Chonka said that the targeting of journalists is done with the intention of silencing and restricting information about the scale and the severity of the genocide in Gaza. He drew comparisons between the roles of academics and journalists who analyse conflicts. He said that in the US, and increasingly in the UK, universities and academics have become targets of intimidation to silence researchers teaching conflict.

He reported how at King's College London (KCL) there had been a right-wing campaign, led both by students and by external far-right groups, of intimidation, harassment, doxing and spurious complaints to KCL management, targeting academics across the university whose solidarity with Palestine is visible in their research, teaching, and engagement with students. The campaign focused on people of colour, Palestinian colleagues, and junior academics on precarious contracts. The KCL management had largely failed to protect those colleagues.

Pete told us that the murdered medic Adnan al-Bursh was associated with KCL and King's College Health Partners: he did a fellowship at King’s.

“Shamefully. King's has not yet acknowledged the horrific murder of Adnan al-Bursh by Israeli forces, despite the union pressuring them to do so. The campaign of intimidation is ongoing at King’s, and as trade unionists we strive to resist it.

“KCL UCU held a successful consultative ballot to start a process of industrial action, to challenge KCL management over their failure to protect staff and academic freedom.”

John McDonnell quietly proposed, after questions, developing a parliamentary strategy, starting with an Early Day Motion to address the national media strategy and engage the Secretary of State. He said that our major question is to the Director General of the BBC – and that he would be in touch with the NUJ to work on the parliamentary strategy.

Back on 26 January 2024 the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel's actions in Gaza to date met the threshold for issuing anti-genocide "provisional measures" ordering it to cease its actions. But as we all know, thanks to reporting by Gazan journalists on the ground, Israel continues the mass slaughter of civilians by every means in Gaza - and with every passing moment the situation there becomes more horrific.

The Freelance thanks John McDonnell for sponsoring our meeting and all the panel for their bravery in speaking out.

The Freelance also expresses solidarity and support for the journalists in Gaza and their extraordinary courage and dedication.

© Pennie Quinton

Remembering journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war