Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, has accused the Israeli government of blocking journalists from Gaza because of scenes “they don’t want us to see”.
Bowen said that in the last 18 months, he had been granted only half a day with the Israeli army within Gaza. He said that the lack of access was part of an attempt to “obfuscate what’s going on, and to inject this notion of doubt into information that comes out”.
Speaking after he accepted a special fellowship award for the Society of Editors conference, he said that while Palestinian journalists were doing “fantastic work”, he and other international media colleagues wanted to contribute to reporting on the ground in Gaza.
“Why don’t they let us in,” he said. “Because there’s stuff there they don’t want us to see. Beginning after those Hamas attacks on 7 October, they took us into the border communities. I was in Kfar Aza when there was still fighting going on inside it. They had only just started taking out the bodies of the dead Israelis. Why did they let us in there? Because they wanted us to see it.
“Why don’t they let us in to Gaza? Because they don’t want us to see it. I think it’s really as simple as that. Israel took a bit of flak for that to start with, but none now, certainly not with [President] Trump. So I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”
The Israeli government has been approached for comment. However, Israel’s military has previously said that it has escorted journalists to Gaza to allow them to report safely. According to the Foreign Press Association, Israel’s defence authorities have said that journalists in Gaza could be at risk in wartime and could endanger soldiers by reporting on troop positions. Scores of journalists have been killed since the war started.
Asked about whether international media should trust Gaza casualty figures released by the territory’s health ministry, which is led by Hamas, Bowen said the numbers were currently “the best measure that we have” because of the inability of reporters and other bodies to verify them. The ministry says more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed during the war.
“I think without question, it’s the bloodiest war that they’ve had since the foundation of the Israeli state of 1948,” Bowen said. “If the place could open up, people could go through, look at the records, count the graves, exhume the skeletons from under the rubble and then they’d get a better idea. But when the doors shut, these things become very, very difficult.”
Last year, Bowen was among 50 journalists, including the BBC’s Lyse Doucet and its former presenter Mishal Husain, calling on Israel and Egypt to provide “free and unfettered access to Gaza for all foreign media”.
Bowen’s intervention comes with the BBC still investigating the making of the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which was pulled from iPlayer after it emerged that the 13-year-old who narrated the film, Abdullah al-Yazouri, was the son of the deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas government.
