The BBC logo is seen at the entrance at Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters in central London. Photo by Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

Nearly eight years ago, in May 2017, the BBC News website published a report on the topic of a policy document published by Hamas. At the time, the BBC accurately reported that:

The new document, which Hamas says does not replace the charter, accepts the establishment of a Palestinian state within territories occupied by Israel in 1967 as a stage towards the “liberation” of all of historic Palestine west of the River Jordan.

This is an apparent shift in Hamas’s stated position, which previously rejected any territorial compromise.

The document says this does not, however, mean Hamas recognises Israel’s right to exist in any part of the land or that it no longer advocates violence against Israel. [emphasis added]

However, as CAMERA UK documented at the time, additional BBC reporting — including from the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Yolande Knell — promoted a false portrayal of the document as a “new charter,” and the inaccurate claim that “it really drops its long-standing call for an outright destruction of Israel.”

Months later, the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, was still promoting the inaccurate claim that Hamas had “made some changes” to its charter.

Notably, the BBC refused to correct that misinformation.

In January 2018, a Hamas leader clarified directly to the BBC that “we are not going to denounce a square meter of our land which is Palestine,” and in 2020, another Hamas leader told a different media outlet that “Palestine must stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

Nevertheless, viewers watching BBC News channel coverage of the fifth phase of the release of Israeli hostages on the morning of February 8 heard the following from contributor Oliver McTernan of the British charity Forward Thinking. [emphasis in italics in the original, emphasis in bold added]

BBC anchor: “You talk about Hamas’ political will for a solution but they do still have in their charter — don’t they — the destruction of the State of Israel. They did launch those attacks, murdering 1,200 people on October 7th.”

McTernan: “Well I think there are two things there. On the one hand, the 2017 document was to replace the charter and as I say, that was the acceptance of a two-state solution on ’67 borders. But the horror of what happened on October 7th – and, let’s face it, it was reprehensible – the level of violence, the nature of the violence, the taking of innocent families and so forth into Gaza, that, I think, it…you cannot justify it on any level whatsoever. But you have to try and understand it – that you get an inevitable explosion of violence if there is no political track which people can follow and horizon where they can see some sort of future.”

The BBC should have been able to anticipate that disinformation concerning the 2017 document and Hamas’ purported “acceptance of a two-state solution” — as well as “conflict resolution expert” McTernan’s “contextualisation”of the massacre perpetrated by Hamas and others on October 7, 2023.

On the morning of that very day, McTernan was in a BBC studio describing the then ongoing invasion of Israel and slaughter of civilians as an “expression of frustration” and telling audiences about his then recent trip to South Africa, where he met with Palestinian representatives.

In July 2024, the BBC television and radio program Hardtalk interviewed McTernan:

Sarah Montague speaks to former Catholic priest Oliver McTernan who has spent more than two decades working in conflict resolution in the Middle East. He is the director of the organisation Forward Thinking and was involved in negotiations that led to the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011. While he has no formal role in the current talks over the war in Gaza, he regularly speaks to senior figures in both Hamas and the Israeli government. Given the history of this protracted conflict, does he hold any hope that it will ever be resolved?

In addition to repeatedly promoting the false Hamas narrative of a siege on the Gaza Strip and providing a decidedly bizarre explanation for the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit in 2006, McTernan responded to Sarah Montague’s observation that one of the terrorists released in exchange for Shalit was Yahya Sinwar who “masterminded October 7” with the claim that “if there had been the lifting of the siege of Gaza, circumstances would have changed and you would not have got, I think, the level of violence that we witnessed on October 7. […] It was the lack of political progress that actually empowered the militant side of Hamas.”

Towards the end of that interview, throughout which he tried to promote the redundant notion of separate “wings” to Hamas, McTernan made the following statement: “We forget that in 2017 Hamas issued a political statement […] where they recognised a two-state solution on ’67 borders.”

In other words — despite the existence of BBC procedures concerning risk assessment, including of “factual errors,” in live content —  when the BBC News channel invited McTernan to participate in its coverage of the release of three Israeli hostages on February 8, 2025, it already knew that he is a promoter of the false notion of “’67 borders”; that he spreads disinformation concerning non-existent Hamas acceptance of a two-state solution; that he wrongly claims that the 2017 document “replaced” the Hamas charter; that he advances the redundant claim of separate “wings” to that terrorist organization; and that he makes excuses for the worst massacre in Israel’s history.

Where is the outrage?

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