THE BBC has officially axed plans to show a documentary about medics in Gaza over "impartiality" concerns.
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack explored the destruction of the health service in Gaza under Israel's brutal bombardment, and was reportedly ready to be broadcast in February.
We told how the documentary was shelved last month following the controversy around How To Survive A Warzone, which featured the son of a Hamas official.
The production firm behind Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, Basement Films, said at the time that the BBC had postponed airing its film until after a review into How To Survive A Warzone is complete.
However, despite the fact that this review remains ongoing, the BBC has now officially scrapped plans to show the documentary after concluding that it "risked creating a perception of partiality" over the corporation's coverage of Israel and Gaza.
In a statement published on Friday, the BBC said: “Our aim was to find a way to air some of the material in our news programmes, in line with our impartiality standards, before the review was published.
"For some weeks, the BBC has been working with Basement Films to find a way to tell the stories of these doctors on our platforms.”
It added: “Yesterday, it became apparent that we have reached the end of the road with these discussions.
"We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC.
"Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world’s most trusted broadcaster."
The BBC said it was transferring ownership of the film material to Basement Films, and that the documentary had "not undergone the BBC's final pre-broadcast sign-off processes", as some reports had suggested.
The corporation also "thanked" those who contributed to the documentary and said "we are sorry we could not tell their stories".
The BBC has been increasingly accused of failing to report on Israel's assault on Gaza in an impartial manner.
A report published this week by the Centre for Media Monitoring found that the corporation's coverage showed a "pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices".
It found that the word "massacre(d)" was used 18 times more frequently in the context of Israeli deaths than Palestinian deaths in BBC articles.
Emotive terms such as “atrocities”, “slaughter”, “barbaric”, “deadly” and “brutal” were used four times more often when reporting on Israeli victims, while “murder(ed)” was used 220 times in the Israeli context and just once for Palestinians.
The report analysed a total of 3873 articles and 32,092 TV and radio broadcasts between October 7, 2023 to October 7, 2024.
