BBC’s executive committee met nine times with Jewish community groups and only once with a pro-Palestinian organisation during the first year of the Gaza genocide, a Freedom of Information request has revealed. The FOI request, filed by the UK-based Campaign Against Misrepresentation in Public Affairs, Information and News ( CAMPAIN ) asked how many times members of the committee met with a specific list of major Jewish and pro-Palestinian organisations in the UK. The organisations listed in the FOI were the same ones which the BBC described as “representative groups” in parliamentary committee evidence last year about its Gaza coverage
Between 1 November 2023 and 31 December 2024, the BBC said that the committee held nine meetings with Jewish community groups and only one with a group advocating for Palestinians.
Although Britain’s Jewish community has a diverse range of views on Israel-Palestine, the groups listed as meeting with the BBC are all strongly sympathetic to the Israeli cause.
BBC committee members, who are in charge of the broadcaster’s day-to-day operations, met twice each with the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Chief Rabbi and the Campaign Against Antisemitism.
Three meetings were held with the Community Security Trust, the FOI shows.
Only one meeting was held with a pro-Palestinian group, the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), during the same time period.
Chris Doyle, CAABU’s director, said the tally of meetings “exposes the way [BBC’s management] are far more concerned with the complaints and concerns of the pro-Netanyahu lobby than they are with those who believe in the rights of Palestinians”.
“This is so borne out by the absence of reference to international legal issues, the fewer numbers of Palestinians who get on the BBC, the way in which people who raise the issue of genocide frequently get shut down – all of these and more show why BBC management has failed,” he said. “They still see the story as a balance between one side says this and one side says the other, not an occupier perpetrating a genocide.” RELATED BBC chief downplays Britain’s military support for Israel thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(25)00522-4/fulltext">at least 72,265 Palestinians killed. Declassified has previously revealed that the BBC’s director of news content, along with editors of The Guardian and the Financial Times , met with a top former Israeli military officer weeks after the Gaza bombing began.
In evidence to parliament last year, the BBC said that executive committee members had met with Jewish community groups seven times between January and November 2025.
During the same period, executives held four meetings with groups representing the Palestinian community.
“If you add up the total of these two time periods, there were 14 meetings with Zionist groups and five with pro-Palestinians,” Professor David Mond, a member of CAMPAIN’s executive committee, told Declassified .
“But the disproportion was most extreme in the first period that set the tone for subsequent BBC reporting of the war.”
He added: “How can the BBC claim to be even-handed if it consults with pressure groups from one side and ignores those from the other?”
Asked for comment, a BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC engages with a broad range of organisations as part of its routine external engagement, including in meetings not captured within the limited scope of this analysis, such as a meeting with the Head of the Palestinian Mission one day outside of the FOI timeframe.
“The BBC is fully committed to reporting the Israel-Gaza conflict impartiality and has produced powerful coverage from the region. Alongside breaking news, analysis and investigations, we have produced award winning documentaries such as Life and Death in Gaza, and Gaza 101.”
The BBC also highlighted that the FOI request did not capture meetings between the executive committee and other organisations that weren’t listed, like the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) at the Muslim Council of Britain, nor those held between senior figures not serving on the committee.
However, emails between CAMPAIN and the BBC show that they originally asked for meetings between all groups and other senior staff, but were told that the request had to be narrowed in order not to exceed the cost limits of FOI requests.
In addition to the FOI, CAMPAIN – which maintains a database of links to online sources on BBC bias – surveyed nearly a dozen organisations with pro-Palestinian stances, including the CfMM.
None of the groups said they had met with the executive committee, nor had they asked for meetings with the BBC during the FOI time period.
Jewish groups sympathetic to the Palestinians, such as Jewish Voice for Liberation and Jews for Justice for Palestinians, said they had never been contacted by the BBC.
In contrast, the Board of Deputies proposed quarterly meetings with the BBC in August 2024.
“Given the close fit between the interests of the BoD, Chief Rabbi and CST, it seems they got more or less what they asked for,” Prof Mond said.
“The BBC’s charter requires it to consult in an even-handed way. So its failure to match its meetings with pro-Zionist groups with meetings with pro-Palestinian groups violates this charter requirement.” ‘Tick-box exercise’ But even pro-Palestinian organisations that met with the committee said that they had felt let down by their outcomes.
Doyle said of CAABU’s meeting with Tim Davie, then BBC general director, and several other high level executives: “It felt like a tick box exercise because there was no real follow up. It’s just unbelievably disappointing.” “ I don’t believe it changed a thing,” he added.
Dr Zena Agha, interim director of the British Palestinian Committee, said her organisation asked the BBC for a meeting which happened in May 2025, also with Davie and two of his associates. “ The BBC agreed to meet after the chaotic fall-out from the Gaza documentaries as well as other campaigning,” she said.
During the meeting, she said Davie “indicated that they had met with pro-Israeli representatives and seemed to approach this as [a] ‘both sides’ issue where we were but one perspective, as opposed to a group who were there to demand better reporting on genocide”. “Indeed one of our party had lost scores of family members and spoke about his experience as a Gazan and as a poorly-treated guest on the BBC.”
She concluded: “It was the first and last of its kind and it wasn’t a productive meeting. I don’t think the BBC improved its coverage of the genocide as a result of our meeting.” RELATED The BBC edit no one will resign over The CfMM found in a report last June that Israeli deaths received 33 times as much attention in BBC articles as the deaths of Palestinians. There was particular controversy around two documentaries. Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was broadcast, but then was pulled from BBC iPlayer after it emerged that the father of the film’s 13-year-old narrator was the deputy ministry of agriculture in the Hamas-run government.
Another documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, was shelved before broadcast with the BBC saying the material “risked creating a perception of partiality” that would not meet its standards. The documentary then aired on Channel 4 . More recently, the BBC has come under pressure from the Information Commissioner’s Office for failing to give a substantive response to a different FOI request.
The broadcaster has been ordered to release records of any calls between the Israeli embassy and mobile phones of top BBC executives, or explain why they are withholding the information. It also comes as the High Court ruled in favour of Guardian columnist Owen Jones in a preliminary hearing for the libel case which had been brought by BBC Middle East Editor, Raffi Berg, over Jones’ reporting about the BBC’s Gaza coverage.
Among over a dozen BBC staffers whom Jones interviewed for his Drop Site News investigation which sparked the legal action, Berg was “singled out” as playing “a key role in a wider BBC culture of ‘systematic Israeli propaganda’,” he wrote.
Social media users have recently piled on criticism of BBC presenter Nick Robinson who said on X that the BBC was “doing our job” by not referring to Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.
Prof Mond said CAMPAIN’s findings brought to mind the BBC’s explanation about why it hadn’t broadcast Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
“They said they would not show it because it might create an impression of bias,” he said.
“What strikes me about this is that withholding the documentary created a very strong impression of bias, much stronger and more widespread, I’m sure, than the impression of bias that might have resulted from showing it.
“But evidently, what counted with the BBC was whose complaint of bias would carry weight. I think this tallies very clearly with what our FOI request has uncovered.”
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