BBC reporter resigns over Gaza-Israel conflict amid criticism of Western media
BBC journalist Bassam Bounenni submitted his resignation amid the British Broadcasting Corporation row on the Israel-Gaza conflict
BBC journalist Bassam Bounenni submitted his resignation amid the British Broadcasting Corporation row on the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Bounenni posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, “This morning, I submitted my resignation from the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, as required by my professional conscience.”
Bassam Bounenni used to work as a BBC North Africa correspondent.
This comes after BBC announced probing six journalists and a freelancer over social media posts related to the latest Israel-Gaza conflict which started on Oct. 7.
BBC said to investigate six journalists who are working for its Arabic service in the Middle East over social media posts “justifying the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas,” according to local media reports.
The six journalists and the freelancers are Senior broadcast journalist Mahmoud Sheleib, broadcast journalist Aya Hossam, correspondent Sally Nabil, Cairo-based Salma Khattab, Beirut-based religious affairs correspondent Sanaa Khouri, Beirut-based program editor Nada Abdelsamad, and Egypt All Sports, a company run by Amr Fekry, a sports correspondent and pundit at BBC Arabic, the Daily Mail reported.
Some of the messages on X said to have been liked include a video of bodies and kidnapped people loaded onto a Jeep captioned as a ‘proud moment’, and another saying Zionists ‘will live as a thief and a usurper’.
This comes after the Western media received backlash over its coverage of the Gaza-Israel conflict.
British journalist Harry Fear has accused Western media of exhibiting bias in its coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, saying the “overarching storytelling” is based on the Israeli narrative.
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Speaking to Anadolu, Fear, known for directing the 2019 documentary, Gaza: Still Alive, critiqued the language used by mainstream Western media while reporting on the conflict.
“What we are looking at now is a bloodbath, a bloodbath designed to exact revenge on the Gaza population,” Fear said.
He said the Western media focused on unverified information about Israeli civilians while neglecting the suffering of Palestinian civilians, especially children who were killed over the years.
Singling out the BBC and other reputed media organizations for their choice of words when covering the Gaza conflict, Fear said the British public broadcaster used distinct terminology in its reporting, referring to those killed in Gaza as “died,” and those in Israel as “killed.”
Fear also criticized other mainstream outlets for their apparent lack of empathy towards Palestinian civilians.
“Because Palestinians have basically been categorized effectively as unpeople, humans that are just, well, ‘human animals’, to use the word of the Israeli officials,” he said. “And that’s very much how the mainstream narrative captures the story as well.”
He said, “the framing of the conflict in this latest round of fighting usually completely silences the context of 16 years of strangulation and siege, an ongoing war on Gaza, a complete denial of Palestinians, human rights, civil rights, political economic rights, really that dignity as humans at all, largely based on an ideology of racial supremacy and domination.”
Commenting on an allegation by an Israeli journalist who claimed live on air that Hamas beheaded 40 Israeli babies, Fear said: “Is it true that Hamas carried out beheadings of 40 children? Well, it looks like that that isn’t true, because there has been no evidence.”
But, he added, “the story was then fed effectively throughout the English-speaking western media landscape, including landing on the front pages of major London newspapers.”
Children “have already been beheaded by Israel’s aerial bombardments, but that is of little to no report in the Western reportage,” he said.
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