UK Politics

A BBC editorial policy representative said he thought a UN report on hospital attacks cited in our film should not be included because, he said, “the UN is not a trusted independent organisation”. The same had been repeatedly said about Amnesty International.

Later in the same meeting, we discussed another request from the BBC; that we use the testimony of two high-profile hospital directors who had been detained and allegedly tortured by Israeli forces. The use of interviews with prisoners under duress is not only a breach of the Geneva conventions, but breaks Ofcom’s code. We explained this at length in meetings and by email, citing numerous examples, and in the end we won the argument.

Script meetings were also dominated by references to what “Collier” might say – referring to David Collier, a social media activist who had discovered the omissions of the previous film. In one editorial meeting, after viewing our film for the first time, a senior BBC reporter told us we should not use certain information as this would not be acceptable to Camera, a pro-Israel media monitoring organisation.