Exclusive: Channel 4 News won awards for its reporting covering the Gaza conflict. So I went looking for an early Channel 4 news item to look more closely at what was so ‘award worthy’ about their reporting, and guess what I found…

Channel 4 News, the first Doctor – and the viral story

I started by looking for early news footage on the conflict from Channel 4, and I found a 7 minute clip from October 25 2023 titled ‘Inside the Gaza hospitals facing catastrophe’.

In the footage, the very first ‘witness’ who appears is Gazan doctor Mohammed Qandil from the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis.

Setting the stage for the entire piece, Mohammed Qandil tells the viewers that the situation is so bad, that because they do not have electricity, the doctors at Nasser hospital are left working on the patients with the light from mobile phones (those filming do not stop to ask how they charge the mobile phones if there is no fuel).

This story, of the Gazan surgeons performing operations using only the flashlight of their mobile phones, became one of the early viral stories of the conflict.

All provided by the good doctor at Nasser hospital – and the first person interviewed in the Channel 4 News item – Mohammed Qandil.

Who is Mohammed Qandil

Mohammed Qandil was born in 1988 and qualified in 2012 in the Hamas led Islamic University of Gaza. According to the CV posted by Nasser Medical Complex he spent several years working in Qatar at Hamad Medical Corporation (Qatar’s leading public healthcare provider). Qatar of course is home to much of the Hamas leadership. Qandil appears to have returned to Gaza to work at the hospital in 2019.

Which brings us to the 2023 Oct 7 conflict. This post was placed on the Hamas run media channel on telegram at 14:08 on 14th October 2023.

(Government Media Office – Dear Colleagues: To conduct interviews and press reports in English about the latest developments in the aggression and the work of Nasser Medical Complex “numbers and statistics”, contact Dr. Muhammad Qandil, Head of the Emergency and Ambulance Department at Nasser Medical Complex, number: 059 7532991)

The post is an instruction from Hamas for ‘colleagues’ (Gazans with cameras pretending to be journalists), to go to the Nasser Medical Complex and use Dr Muhammad Qandil as the correct source for information. Even handing out his phone number.

We know this is him, because the same number (059 7532991) appears on Qandil’s professional FB page:

It is a bit of a coincidence that Channel 4’s ‘men on the ground’ happen to hand them the footage from the same doctor that Hamas is telling everyone to talk to – but in reality this is how these doctors always end up on our screens. Hamas points out the ‘loyalists’ that Gazans are allowed to use as ‘witnesses’ in the Hamas pantomime – and hey presto – Channel 4 present it all as real news being delivered by a trustworthy and impartial source.

So the first deception in the Channel 4 piece is that we are not told that the journalists were directed to speak to this doctor by Hamas.

The doctor’s siblings

As it happens, activity on Mohammed Qandil’s personal FB page is totally hidden – but I found other members of his family somewhat less concerned about privacy. I identified two of the Doctor’s siblings, Omar Qandil and Em Mido (the mother of Mido) Qandil . Here they both are congratulating their brother under a post about his achievements at the Nasser Medical Complex.

And these family links (confirmed in other posts) made things a lot more interesting

A post from the sister

This is a 2017 post from the good doctor’s sister. The post is an image of a terrorist, who she is referring to as ‘her brother’.

The two siblings, Mohammed (our doctor) and her brother Omar have both liked the post.

Ismail Qandil – the Hamas terrorist

The terrorist in the image is Ismail Qandil. A Hamas terrorist who was killed while firing rockets at Israeli civilians (November 16 2012).

The date November 16 is significant. The sister posted her memorial post on the 5th anniversary of his death. Mohammed would therefore have been 24 when his younger brother (23) was killed as a Hamas terrorist trying to fire rockets at Israel. The FB page of the other brother (Omar) is slightly more public  – and memorial posts for their brother the terrorist are visible from 2021, going all the way back to 2013.

As a side, in posts on FB, Mohammed is referred to as ‘Abu Ismail’ (father of Ismail) by a work colleague, which suggests Mohammed Qandil may well have named his first born son after his fallen Hamas brother.

So a second vital piece of information withheld from viewers was this: It appears very likely the doctor being used as a reliable witness has family affiliations to Hamas, and even had a Hamas terrorist for a brother, who was killed while firing rockets at Israel.

The Channel 4 doctor supporting terrorism

And before anyone can say there is no evidence the doctor supports terrorism (despite the Hamas affiliations of his family) this is a post from his brother Omar, celebrating a mass shooting in Dizengoff St Tel Aviv on April 7 2022:

And of course, our doctor, Mohammed Qandil, liked the post:

He also did the same following on one of his brother’s celebratory posts after an attack in Bnei Brak on 29th March 2022 that slaughtered five.

So a third vital piece of information withheld from viewers was this: Telling viewers that their witness also publicly supports terrorists who walk through civilian areas and mass murder people.

Channel 4 News, the context and the truth

Since long before October 7, Hamas has been feeding raw propaganda into the western mainstream. They have  been able to do this so successfully because western media appears too far gone to care. The Washington Post , New York Times,  BBC,  NBC, and the Wall St Journal, all used Mohammed Qandil as a key witness at Nasser hospital – with many of them pushing the viral ‘surgery by mobile phone’ nonsense.

And once again – everything I have found out about the doctor, the Hamas directive, his family affiliations, and his support for terrorism, is available publicly online. Either ‘award winning’ Channel 4 News could not be bothered to do a background check at all, or knew and chose to withhold the information.

It is probably a mixture of both; those in Gaza knew and chose not to pass the information upstream, and those in the Channel 4 News team in the UK are just lazy, unprofessional and incompetent ‘activists’ who care more about pushing the anti-Israel narrative, than checking to make sure they are not spreading the lies of a proscribed terrorist organisation.

I cannot know exactly what the truth is, but I do know this – there is far more to this footage than meets the eye.

Hamas told the media outlets who to talk to, and the person everyone interviewed not only spent several years in Qatar – but had a brother who was apparently killed while firing rockets and supports the terrorist murder of civilians himself. Is this relevant to the audience in judging his reliability as a witness or not? And if it is (and it obviously is) – then why are NONE of the media outlets doing the most basic level of due diligence before allowing these people to act as impartial witnesses on our screens?

‘Surgery by Mobile flashlight’. A Hamas viral story brought to you by the brother of a dead Hamas terrorist who was placed in front of the cameras by a Hamas directive. And western media lapped it all up.

It is 20 months too late to correct the damage now.

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