Gaza filmmakers attack BBC after rejected documentary wins Bafta
Gaza filmmakers attack BBC after rejected documentary wins Bafta
Anita SinghSun, May 10, 2026 at 10:38 PM UTC
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As he accepted the award, Ben De Pear said: ‘Just a question for the BBC: given that you dropped our film, will you drop us from the Bafta screening later tonight?’ - Jeff Spicer/BAFTA/Getty Images
The BBC was forced to broadcast criticism of its own management after a Gaza documentary it rejected was awarded a Bafta.
Channel 4’s Gaza: Doctors Under Attack won the current affairs category at the Bafta TV Awards, a year after the BBC refused to air it.
On stage, the filmmakers launched a scathing attack on the corporation before challenging BBC One to air their remarks.
The film was originally commissioned by the BBC but pulled by management amid fears it would damage the broadcaster’s reputation for impartiality, coming soon after a different Gaza documentary failed to tell viewers that its child narrator was the son of a Hamas official.
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack was then picked up by Channel 4 and broadcast in July last year.
The film had been commissioned by the BBC before being withdrawn by management
In her acceptance speech, Ramita Navai, the presenter, claimed 1,700 Palestinian doctors and healthcare workers had been killed in Israeli bombing of Gaza’s hospitals, and alleged that a further 400 had been imprisoned.
“These are the findings of our investigation that the BBC paid for but refused to show. But we refused to be silenced and censored, and we thank Channel 4 for showing this film,” Navai said, to applause from the audience.
Ben de Pear, the film’s producer, then said: “Just a question for the BBC: given that you dropped our film, will you drop us from the Bafta screening later tonight?”
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The Bafta ceremony is broadcast on BBC One on a two-hour delay. After consulting its compliance team, the BBC chose not to air Navai’s speech in full but instead presented a carefully edited version which removed her claims about Israel’s actions.
Channel 4 later acquired Gaza: Doctors Under Attack and aired it in July last year
De Pear paid tribute to the two Gazan journalists who filmed footage for the documentary, Jaber Badwan and Osana Al Ashi.
Speaking backstage, he said the team “woke up every day wondering if the two journalists on the ground were still alive”.
He added: “The commissioners at the BBC had a problem engaging with the material. There wasn’t a single complaint [from viewers], there wasn’t a single factual inaccuracy in the film. We have had nothing but praise.”
The BBC paused production of the film last April, saying that it could not broadcast it while a review into a separate documentary with the child narrator – Gaza: How To Survive a War Zone – was going on.
It pulled out completely after Navai gave an interview in which she described Israel as “a rogue state that is committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass murdering Palestinians”.
At the time, the BBC said: “We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC.
“Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world’s most trusted broadcaster.”
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
