Gaza documentary narrated by Hamas official’s son breached accuracy guideline, review finds

has concluded that a documentary about the lives of children in Gaza breached editorial guidelines on accuracy.

The film was pulled from iPlayer in February after it emerged the 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official.

The review also found three members of the independent production company knew of the father’s position, but no-one within the BBC knew this at the time.

It concludes that independent production company, Hoyo Films bears most of the responsibility, but that the BBC was not “sufficiently proactive” with initial editorial checks.

Reaction to the findings have poured in throughout the day, with BBC director general Tim Davie vowing to take action “to prevent such errors being repeated”.

Meanwhile, Hoyo Films says it will “improve processes and prevent similar problems in the future”.

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We earlier heard from Stewart Purvis, a former chief executive of ITN and former content regulator at Ofcom, on Radio 4’s World at One programme.

He says there are questions about what the independent production company told the BBC.

“When you drill down into the details, I can see at least two occasions where the BBC asked the production company questions where it would be reasonable to expect the company to have answered by saying, actually, the boy’s father is the deputy minister of agriculture in Hamas,” he says.

He says the report shows that BBC asked whether there was a “paper trail” that would raise concerns about the contributors, and it was told there social media activity was “clean”. The BBC asked again whether the lead boy had links to Hamas, he adds.

“The BBC, clearly, according to Peter Johnston, did not pin down the answers to the questions it had asked,” he says.

Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was made by the independent company Hoyo Film and commissioned by the BBC.

Directed by Jamie Roberts and Yousef Hammash, the film follows the lives of young people living in an active warzone.

Israel does not allow international journalists to enter Gaza to report freely. To make this film, producers in London remotely directed cameramen in Gaza to film over the course of nine months.

The documentary is narrated by a 13-year-old boy, who takes viewers through the stories of four young people.

One of the core issues with the documentary stems from the boy’s family connections, as it later emerged that the film’s narrator is the son of a Hamas official.

Failure to disclose the father’s position was found by a report today to be in breach of the BBC’s editorial guidelines on accuracy.

The film was pulled from iPlayer in February.

You can watch an excerpt from the film below: