“WE put targets on our colleagues. We undermined Palestinians and Palestinian voices. We contributed to dehumanising them. We, I became complicit.
“I became complicit every time I didn't challenge my editor because I was scared of being difficult. I betrayed my journalistic instinct, my journalistic voice.”
That is the stark testimony of former BBC journalist Mohamed Shalaby, who left the corporation last month after becoming exasperated at an inability to internally change – or even in some cases understand – its approach to reporting on the genocide in Gaza.
Speaking to The National on Tuesday, after going public with his decision to end his contract with the BBC, where he had been embedded with the Verify team, Shalaby described working in newsrooms where information from Palestinian sources was treated very differently to information from Israelis.
Shalaby, who has Jewish-Palestinian heritage and was born in Egypt just 150km from Gaza, explained how due diligence conducted on Palestinian sources would change into full background checks.
“A background check is different editorially,” he said. “To run a background check on someone as a journalist, you’d have to have a very strong editorial justification. You analyse their political views, you go into more depth.
"We were doing this disproportionately on Palestinians and Gazans. It was used as a sort of tool to discredit them. It was used as a tool to undermine the stories. It was making me feel that I betrayed my profession and myself.”
Shalaby added: “These background checks masked as due diligence became very strong fertile ground for unconscious bias and, frankly, racism.”
He described such checks being done “in the most horrendous way by journalists and editors who have no experience or no expertise in Gaza and the socio-political, economical context”.
“They would run through someone's Facebook, translate things with ChatGPT or Google Translate, and then think they found some sort of evidence that they had Hamas affiliation,” he said.
Asked if the BBC teams he worked with had also conducted background checks on Israeli sources, he said: “Not even a little bit. Not even.”
Shalaby said this alleged double-standard in the way that the BBC approaches stories from Gazans and from Israelis played out in the case of Anas Al-Sharif, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist killed by Israel in a targeted strike on August 10.
For Shalaby, the BBC’s approach to the story would mark the end of his seven years with the corporation.
“A line pops up on the BBC coverage saying that the BBC ‘understands Sharif worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict’,” he said. “I challenged that line because, internally, I wasn't able to find out the source. I'm a BBC journalist, but I wasn't able to know how we verified that it is credible or independent. I wasn't being told.”
Shalaby, who is based in London, said he tried to raise the matter internally but was told to take his questions “elsewhere”, before a colleague warned he could be “blacklisted from ever working with the BBC again”.
However, he went on: “I needed to know: how do we know this? Especially with such a subject matter, the assassination of a colleague, of a journalist.
“Take away the affinity that I might have with him, being an Arab journalist and being a journalist in an international news organisation, for us to be running such a claim, it should be handled with the utmost editorial procedures.
“What is the context that you are giving here to the audience that is relevant? Is it to imply that the Israeli assassination was justifiable?
“The BBC say that they stand by their coverage, how it was sourced or verified – which I have no clue – but even if they stand by it, do they think this is more relevant than saying that Anas won a Pulitzer award with Reuters last year?
“This is not mentioned in any of the coverage of the BBC. [The BBC reporting] fails to mention this.”
A BBC spokesperson did say that they “stand by our reporting and we strongly reject any accusation of bias”.
They added: “The BBC is committed to reporting the Israel-Gaza war impartially, with no agenda and to the highest editorial standards.”
Shalaby, however, says the different treatment afforded to Palestinian voices was also visible in the BBC’s coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Ukraine's stories would be embraced, would be given a platform, they would be encouraged – and rightly so, but it just wasn't the same way that they approached [Gaza],” he said.
Shalaby recalled pitching one story he believed would be “perfect” for BBC Verify: analysing images of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting a military site in the West Bank. However, it was refused by editors – who just days later green-lit a similar story about Vladimir Putin in Crimea.
“They were doing video, they were doing a text piece, they were doing social media. It was like 360-degree coverage,” Shalaby said. “And that's just one example.”
The former BBC journalist spoke to The National just hours after a UN Human Rights Council commission – led by former president of the Rwanda genocide international tribunal Navi Pillay – published conclusions that Israel had committed four of the five “genocidal acts” defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention .
Asked if he believed the weight of such opinion might shift BBC reporting, Shalaby said: “The BBC coverage has shifted over the last few months. But it is too late.
“I think when it shifted, it shifted because of political convenience – and that's not journalism. That's PR. That's diplomacy. But it's not journalism.
“The BBC should be the one who does an investigation to prove that this is genocide, then it goes to the UN. This is the type of journalism that we've been taught. Journalism that holds power to account.”
He added: “My questions will remain about institutional discrimination and racism.
“The UN body is telling us what Palestinians have been telling us and showing us for the last three years. It's what we spend hours at the BBC verifying and trying to report on – but being suppressed by PR and diplomacy.”
