Hamas gunmen stand guard on the day that hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, are handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

Last week, the BBC website published a short update piece by David Gritten titled “Israeli strike on police post in north Gaza kills seven, officials say.”

In just 447 words, Gritten gives us a case study in the linguistic gymnastics the BBC uses in order to create a narrative of blame against Israel, and to systemically erase Palestinian agency.

The title itself is the first example. “Officials say” is a sleight of hand designed to create an image of municipal authority, or maybe even NGOs or hospital officials, but who are the officials? Hamas.

So what the headline should say is “Israeli strike on police post in North Gaza kills seven, Hamas says”. This single tweak changes the weighting of the entire piece, but it’s just the beginning.

The Palestinian territory’s Hamas-run interior ministry said the head of the local police station, Col Mohammed Marwan Salem, and several other officers were among those killed in what it condemned as a “massacre”.

Here we see the first of no less than five uses of the term “Hamas-run” in the piece. The entire phrase “the Palestinian territory’s Hamas-run interior ministry” is another euphemism for Hamas. Hamas says their Colonel was killed. Hamas condemned it as a massacre.

Notice how there’s no qualification or obfuscation when it comes to the IDF press release, except to cast doubt on the use of the word terrorists:

The Israeli military said Marwan was the head of military security for Hamas’s Central Jabalia Battalion, and that three other “terrorists” were killed alongside him.

The Times of Israel quotes the IDF slightly less euphemistically:

The military meanwhile identified three of the operatives killed in the strike as Abd al-Malek Abu al-Jabin, a Nukhba Force operative and chief of investigations in the Hamas-run police; Yaman Mohammed Jibril Ubaid, an operative in the Central Jabalia Battalion; and Ghassan Akram Salama Dakas, an operative in the West Jabalia Battalion and a member of the Hamas police.

The connections between the armed wing of Hamas and its civil police are not interrogated at all. While the IDF maintains there is no distinction between the military and police in Gaza, Hamas has been reportedly using the civil police force as a method to bypass their commitment to surrendering governance of the strip as part of the Trump plan, and even the UN has detailed the horrific tactics of “law and order” employed by Hamas in incidents such as:

five militants from the Sahm Unit of Hamas severely beat and caused serious leg injuries to a Palestinian man on the Nasser Medical Complex premises, an event also captured on video. The victim was accused of drug trafficking and of expressing support to the United States of America and Israel. The victim was stripped to his underwear and pinned to the ground while one militant repeatedly smashed a large cement brick on his legs and another hit his ankle with a metal pipe, likely fracturing it, amid his screams.

And

On 21 September 2025, a group of militants publicly executed three Palestinian men in front of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, accusing them of collaboration with Israel and of affiliation with Popular Forces (Yasser Abu Shabab’s group). The victims are seen in a video blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs, amid a crowd of onlookers. One of eight masked gunmen addresses the crowd stating that: “… The death penalty has been decided against these traitors.” The victims are then knocked to the ground and shot multiple times in the head and upper body. The Commission found that the incident was perpetrated by the Qassam Brigades and the Rad’a Force of Hamas, with the likely additional participation of members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Mujahidin Brigades.

Rather than addressing the BBC’s duty to truth by raising any questions regarding the status of the police in the totalitarian governance system in Gaza, Gritten instead appeals to an emotional quote from a witness whose account actually contradicts the report itself:

“The casualties were taken to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, where the uncle of another dead police officer insisted he was a civilian. “He was on duty – part of the civilian police force – patrolling the Fallujah roundabout in a civilian vehicle when he was targeted by surveillance aircraft,” Mohammed Moussa told Reuters news agency.”

Where was the strike? On a police post as in the headline? Or on a civilian vehicle at a roundabout?

The “Hamas-run” fallacy continues to the conclusion.

“Both Israel and Hamas have accused each other of near-daily violations of the ceasefire that took effect in the Palestinian territory last October. Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry has said at least 1,110 people have been killed by Israeli fire since then”

Note the attempt here to separate Hamas from Hamas. Firstly, the words “the Palestinian territory” are bearing a remarkable amount of weight. This denotes Hamas as a group operating within Palestinian territory rather than the government of Gaza, distancing them from governance and therefore responsibility, then separating the “health ministry” again from the brutal terrorist organization guilty of atrocities against both Palestinians and Israelis.

Repeatedly, this formulation that the BBC has been forced to adopt is being used to obfuscate rather than to clarify. The phrase is meant to keep people aware of the source of the information. However what the BBC creates in reality is an operational paradox. They use “Hamas-run” as a generic bureaucratic label, like saying the “Metropolitan Police” or “the NHS” to mask a paramilitary security force run by a totalitarian terror organization during an active war. They effectively tell the reader that a man wearing the uniform of a terrorist regime’s enforcement wing is just a traffic cop, and the health officials at Al-Shifa hospital, arguably the most documented Hamas headquarters in the Gaza strip, are just doctors.

In his conclusion, Gritten is forced to accept Hamas agency.

The war was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

But note the careful passive voice. The war was triggered. Like the consequence of an unavoidable natural phenomenon, whereas:

Israel responded to the attack by launching a military campaign in Gaza

A more accurate description would be that Hamas launched the war with its brutal assault on southern Israel on October 7th, deliberately and with the expectation that the Israeli response would be devastating. But that, unfortunately for the BBC, would require accepting that this war was a war of choice launched by a fundamentalist terrorist organization which holds its own people hostage. Once again, the BBC refuses to lay any agency at the feet of people it increasingly appears to view as purely reactive, uncomplex and incapable of strategic thought.

The relentless narrative construction of Israeli culpability for everything paints Palestinians as childlike and incapable as well as utterly obscuring objective truth. The BBC claims: “our role is to explain precisely what is happening so that the public can make their own judgements.”

They continue to fail to do so.

Hadar Sela writes for CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.