From its opening line, the Peter Johnston review into the Hamasgate BBC documentary reads less like an investigation and more like an institutional reflex – a superficial exercise in damage control. What it offers is not insight into editorial failings, but into how the BBC protects itself when caught out.

Good faith – the phone call

A particularly revealing failure in the Johnston review is hidden away in footnote 38, which discusses a phone call that took place shortly after the documentary’s broadcast. During this call, a member of the production team reportedly suggested they had deliberately chosen not to inform the BBC about the narrator’s father’s Hamas role because it would ‘scare them.’

Johnston acknowledges the comment but downplays its significance, preferring the convenient narrative of ‘good faith’- that there was no deliberate deception.

This wilful suspension of disbelief typifies the BBC’s broader approach to reporting from Gaza; a posture of institutional naivety, where good faith is assumed even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary. When confronted with indicators that the BBC may have been misled, the possibility is swiftly dismissed.

But what if not everyone involved was acting in good faith? What if the production was influenced, even subtly, by individuals with extreme religiously driven motivations? The BBC’s refusal to engage seriously with these questions is a critical failure; one that calls into question not just the integrity of the entire review process, but of the BBC’s reporting from Gaza as a whole.

A father’s influence

One of the review’s most implausible conclusions is the outright dismissal of any suggestion that the narrator’s father, a senior Hamas official, may have influenced the programme.

The production team’s relationship with the narrator, Abdullah Alyazouri, spanned several months. During that time, Abdullah would have returned home daily to a father who held a prominent position in the Hamas-run government. To suggest that this family dynamic had no bearing whatsoever on the boy’s performance or the content of the film is not just naïve – it defies common sense.

In addition, several crew members had posted pro-terrorist material on social media, so this conclusion leans yet again on the overused good faith defence. What exactly gives Peter Johnston such unwavering confidence that no one involved in the production sought to use the BBC platform for ideological purposes – and this would include hiding any influence that the boy’s father may have had?

The technocrat excuse

A significant portion of the Peter Johnston review is spent legitimising a central excuse offered by the production company; that Ayman Alyazouri, the narrator’s father, was merely a technocrat – a civil servant detached from Hamas’s terrorist activities. The review adopts this framing because it supports the convenient narrative that the omission of Ayman’s identity was a minor, non-deliberate oversight – one that minimises the BBC’s failings and protects the production company from more serious accusations. Recent comments by the BBC’s head of news Deborah Turness suggest the BBC are doubling down on this position.

This line of reasoning is deeply flawed.

Abdullah is part of Hamas royalty. His father’s cousin helped found Hamas. It is almost certain that it was nepotism rather than neutral professionalism that led to Ayman’s appointment to a senior post in the Hamas-run government.

Second, the notion that Hamas has a meaningful separation between its ‘political’ and ‘military’ wings is fiction. Hamas is not a political party in the Western sense – it is a radical Islamist organisation rooted in an ideology of violent jihad. Its political apparatus exists to serve and legitimise its terrorist goals.

Ayman Alyazouri was a key figure in a movement that promotes the mass killing of Jews as part of its founding charter. Today he is the agriculture minister; before that he was in education – leading an indoctrination machine that shapes children into terrorists. To describe such an individual as a benign technocrat is not just misleading – it’s dangerously disingenuous.

Where good faith ends  (Hamas ideology)

The most fundamental blind spot in the Johnston review – and in much of the BBC’s Gaza reporting  – is the refusal to grapple with the reality that Hamas is driven by a radical Islamic ideology.

The BBC continues to frame the conflict as a conventional land dispute, presenting Israel as the aggressor, oppressing a population of Palestinians, with a few turning to extremism as a reaction. This misleading paradigm ignores key facts; since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005, Hamas has turned Gaza into a terrorist enclave openly declaring genocidal intent toward Jews, not just Israelis.

If the BBC consistently treats Gazan witness statements as credible, why does it selectively mistranslate religiously targeted hate speech – like ‘Yahud’ as ‘Israeli’ – especially when such phrases originate in religious texts predating Israel’s founding?

This is cherry-picking at its worst. The stakes are not just semantic, they are existential. While the wider conflict may contain nationalistic and territorial elements, Hamas’s war against Israel is explicitly religious. It is a conflict rooted in jihadist ideology, and enforced through systematic religious indoctrination of the Gazan population. When a Gazan says ‘Jew’, he means ‘Jew’.

To discard this context simply because it complicates a preferred narrative is not just misleading, it’s a dereliction of journalistic duty.

Whitewash – the Channel 4 timeline

Few sections of the Peter Johnston review reveal its whitewashing tendencies as clearly as its treatment of co-director Yousef Hammash.

The review paints him as a UK-based media professional with experience in Gazan productions. It makes passing reference to Channel 4’s prior use of the narrator, Abdullah, as late as April 2024, but does so without connecting any dots.

What the review conceals is that in April 2024, the co-Director Hammash was still in Gaza and working with Channel 4. In fact, he only arrived in the UK in June 2024, shortly before the 20 June meeting mentioned in the report.

When these timelines are properly laid out, they raise serious and obvious questions:

• Did the co-director Yousef Hammash help produce the 13 June taster tape, while still in Gaza?
• Was his relationship with Abdullah forged in Gaza, while he worked for Channel 4?
• Was the documentary crew assembled by Hammash while he was still based in Gaza?
• When he arrived in London in June 2024, was his appointment as co-director already arranged?
• Why does the review address none of this?

These are not minor details – they are central to understanding the origins and integrity of the production. Yet the review ignores them completely. The failure to mention the Channel 4 / Hammash connection, or to interrogate the timeline of his involvement with Abdullah, suggests a deliberate attempt to obscure potentially compromising facts.

A major red flag

The Peter Johnston report’s treatment of how the scandal broke is itself a red flag. It states: ‘following initial transmission of the programme, allegations were made in the press regarding the family connections of the Narrator.’

This is simply not true. Allegations were not ‘made in the press’. A detailed, evidence-based exposé was published on www.david-collier.com. The initial breach was uncovered by a single external researcher – me. I clearly had access to material the BBC missed – so contacting me to see what else I had found would have been a vital step in any serious review of events.

Not contacting me reflects either a desire to limit the scope or a fear of legitimising a critic, both of which are red flags in terms of transparency, professionalism and accountability.

This omission seriously undermines the integrity of the entire review.

The single failing

The Johnston review acknowledges only a single editorial failure, but this barely scratches the surface of the errors uncovered.

What about the case of Zakaria Sarsak, another child featured in the programme, later found in photographs posing with Hamas fighters? Or Renad Attallah, the 10-year-old chef, whose father reportedly served as a police captain, yet another Hamas enforcer hidden behind the scenes.

And what of the multiple crew members whose social media accounts celebrated the October 7 massacre – and praised other terrorist attacks against Israelis.

The review claims that social media checks were conducted and ‘no issues were found’, which is either false or signals incompetence. Either way, the claim that there was only one editorial failure is not remotely credible.

The BBC’s editorial position is that the vast majority of Gazans are innocent civilians, and that Hamas is merely the controlling authority. But in this documentary, three of the four featured children had visible ties to Hamas: Abdullah – his father a senior official; Renad – her father reportedly a Hamas police captain; Zakaria – photographed with Hamas fighters. Several crew members also openly signalled support for Hamas online.

If, as the BBC claims, most of Gaza remains unconnected to the terror group, how does it explain the fact that nearly every individual in Gaza connected with this documentary, has Hamas imprinted on their foreheads? An unlucky coincidence? And why is this critical question not raised in the review?

From the outset, it appears that individuals involved in the production may have been deliberately concealing key affiliations from the BBC – and that the BBC, in turn, was remarkably willing to be deceived. It was this toxic combination of ideological infiltration and institutional complacency that led to the scandal that followed the documentary’s release.

Conclusion

The Johnston review acknowledges only a single editorial failure; the failure to disclose the narrator’s father’s role in the Hamas government.

But given the issues laid out above — the ideological blindness, the unexplored relationships, the whitewashed timelines, and not just the unanswered questions but the crucial ones the review failed even to ask – it is staggering that the BBC believes it can contain this scandal with one narrow admission and a handful of hollow recommendations.

None of those recommendations address the core issue: that the BBC continues to operate in Gaza through a lens of institutional naivety, working alongside individuals shaped by, or sympathetic to, extremist ideologies. As John Ware pointed out in his Jewish News piece yesterday, the BBC’s ignorance of Hamas hasn’t just dented its credibility – it’s shattered it.

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