The Duplicated BBC Verify Article

On 23 October 2025, three BBC Verify journalists, Benedict Garman, Emma Pengelly and Matt Murphy, published a report on IDF movements in Gaza. The article claimed that in two areas, Israel was marking its withdrawal line deeper inside Gaza than originally declared. The areas involved appear to be near Jabalia in the north and Khan Younis in the south, two locations where terrorists continually approach the line and shoot at Israeli soldiers. Moving the concrete block markers would therefore increase the distance between Israeli positions and those attempting to breach the line and attack them.

Such markers would also be positioned according to IDF intelligence regarding tunnels, known Hamas positions, damaged buildings that need to be destroyed, and numerous other considerations that the IDF is under no obligation to disclose to BBC Verify.

Because the team at BBC Verify has no understanding of the military situation on the ground, it was not even a story worth writing. It reads like part of the BBC’s habitual effort to place a biased microscope on Israel, treat it differently to any other nation, and publish decontextualised misinformation as a means of demonising the Jewish state.

Then, on 16 January 2026, the same three journalists published the same story again.

Put the two pieces side by side and the reality is unavoidable: this is not a new investigation. It is the same narrative repackaged and pushed back out as fresh “verification”:

This is where it stops being merely bad and becomes embarrassing.

Look at the opening paragraphs. They are not simply similar in tone. They follow the same sequence and recycle the same framing almost line by line. The red arrows highlight the repeated structure, played out again almost word for word.

This is reporting you expect from an activist blog, not the flagship of BBC News:

The Map That Misleads

Even if the BBC wanted to publish a follow-up, there is an obvious professional standard: acknowledge the earlier report, explain what has changed since October, and present enough new evidence to justify a second article. But that is not what happened. The October report is never referenced. The January report behaves as if it is breaking new ground, while presenting maps that are fundamentally misleading.

I overlaid BBC maps onto a proper map of Gaza to see what had actually changed. The answer is: not what the BBC wants you to think.

The BBC map is designed to create a false impression of movement. In some cases it makes scattered block placements look like a new, deeper “withdrawal line”, when the line itself has not shifted at all. For example, the BBC article explicitly lists Jabalia as a place of further IDF incursion. Yet the only change around Jabalia is that a handful of previously unused blocks appear to have been deployed to match the same line BBC Verify described months earlier.

This is not a new development. It is the same event sold twice.

Place the October and January maps side by side and it becomes obvious. The line runs just north of the visible pier in both images. The line above Jabalia has not moved. But because BBC Verify does not tell the reader that almost all of these blocks were already in place months ago, the January report is seriously misleading:

The Al Jazeera copycat

This embarrassing tale does not end there. The only outlets that appear to be obsessing over the position of these concrete blocks are Qatari mouthpieces such as Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye.

Calling it a “new investigation”, Al Jazeera ran a piece on 11 January. It focused on the blocks, highlighted areas such as al-Tuffah, and used close-up map graphics of Gaza. Five days later, BBC Verify published a report that followed the same approach, down to the same visual framing.

Place the two maps side by side and the similarity is unmistakable. They are, for all practical purposes, the same graphic:

Al Jazeera published first. Whether BBC Verify is taking its cues from a Qatari state mouthpiece, or simply moving slower while producing the same narrative, the result is the same. The British public should not be funding this.

BBC and the Tragic Child Victim

This 16 January BBC Verify piece would not be complete without the familiar framing device: Israel killing innocent children. Much of this section rests on “unverified” anonymous claims routed through Hamas-run structures. But one case is presented with a name and an implied certainty.

The BBC writes that “17-year-old Zaher Nasser Shamiya was killed near yellow blocks in Jabalia camp in northern Gaza.” The BBC then quotes the boy’s father, publishing a completely unverifiable account of how he died.

The problem here is what the BBC leaves out.

Zaher Nasser Shamiya was named after Zaher Adel Harb Shameyah, one of his father’s brothers. That uncle was a Hamas terrorist who was killed while fighting Israel on 19 April 2008. Zaher’s family also published a photo montage showing Zaher alongside two of his “martyr” uncles – both pictured in Hamas gear:

I am not claiming Zaher was a Hamas fighter. I am saying there is enough open-source evidence available to suggest BBC Verify needed to treat this case with care. He was 17 years old (well past recruitment age in Gaza), from a family with clear Hamas affiliation, and was reportedly killed near a prohibited military boundary.

BBC Verify didn’t verify anything here. It selected a death, stripped out context, and presented the reader with a pre-written conclusion. Whatever this is, it is not journalism.

BBC Verify and Its Expert Witness

Along with accusing Israel of killing children, the BBC also loves to accuse Israel of continually stealing Palestinian land. The movement of these yellow blocks, even though, as shown above, many appear not to have moved at all, gives BBC Verify a perfect opportunity to do just that.

When the BBC wants to promote a narrative, it cherry-picks the expert witness who will support it. One of its favourite “go-to” voices on Israel is Dr Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London. He does the job perfectly here, describing the blocks as a “tool for territorial engineering,” which is a polite way of saying “land grab”.

BBC Verify introduces Krieg as a “Middle East security expert”, giving him an air of authority and impartiality. It even refers to him as a “Professor”, adding extra weight to his testimony. Once again, the problem is what the BBC leaves out.

Krieg has spent much of the last decade working with, alongside, and for Qatar.

He has a habit of location-stamping his Facebook profile. While his public branding is “Middle East expert”, his geo-location map tells a different story. There are no visible trips to most Middle Eastern states, except Qatar, which he visited in 2015 (twice), 2016, 2017, 2018 (twice), 2019 (twice), 2020, and 2025. The only other visible visits were to Oman, one of Qatar’s strongest allies in the region.

His social media output reads like a Qatari PR exercise, with thousands of posts on X presenting Qatar as one of the most morally upstanding nations on earth.

Krieg’s timeline is also consistently hostile to both the UAE and Israel, in line with Qatari foreign policy. And as the West wakes up to the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Krieg ridicules the issue entirely. In one inexcusable post, he compares concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood to the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

Either Krieg is implying the Protocols are real, which would make the post overtly antisemitic, or he is dismissing the Muslim Brotherhood as imaginary or irrelevant. Yet France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Sweden and the United States have all recently taken action against the Muslim Brotherhood. That makes it revealing that Krieg instead points the finger at the UAE and Israel.

Despite BBC editorial guidelines on “contributors’ affiliations”, BBC Verify did not consider it necessary to inform readers that its “expert witness” has long-standing links to a state that funds, hosts and supports Hamas.

BBC Verify is a Propaganda Machine

This is an article that did not need to exist at all. It was padded out to manufacture significance, then published, and then published again. From there, the same pattern repeats: selective maps, key omissions, Israel presented as a “child-killer”, a “pro-Qatari expert” introduced as neutral authority, and Israel-hostile influence embedded behind the scenes. Each element pushes the story in one direction.

Taken together, this bias is impossible to excuse away. These are activists, not journalists, and BBC Verify is playing the part of a pro-Hamas propaganda machine. There is no legitimate reason why anyone in the United Kingdom should be forced to pay a licence fee to support it.

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