On Sept. 24, the UK’s Channel 4 Dispatches broadcast a documentary titled ‘Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed,’ in which journalist Ramita Navai investigates UK government assessments of Israel’s conduct to determine whether the UK knowingly continues to export arms to a country it characterises as “committing war crimes.”
The programme, however, is punctuated by a sleuth of distortions: unattributed video footage, video segments sourced back to the legions of Hamas sympathisers, omissions of IDF statements, and the uncritical platforming of individuals whose social media activity suggests a prior investment in advancing anti-Israel narratives and close relationships with Hamas-affiliated individuals.
From the outset, viewers meet Khitam Attallah Elian and Roba Attallah, both originally from Gaza and now living in the UK [5:07]. Viewers are told that 48 relatives of their family were killed in November 2023, following an alleged Israeli airstrike on the Elian family home in Nuseirat, central Gaza. The accompanying footage is second-hand and is said to show the destroyed home and the bodies of [unidentified] relatives, yet Channel 4 offers no comment on its provenance.
Early reports of the strike were purportedly included in an evidence log submitted to the UK’s International Humanitarian Law Compliance Assessment Cell (IHLCAP Cell), an internal government unit tasked with investigating potential breaches of international humanitarian law. However, Channel 4 itself acknowledges that the IHLCAP Cell “did not make a specific finding” on the strike in question.
At the time of writing, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has issued no statement corroborating the alleged strike. Without such confirmation, it is irresponsible for Channel 4 to broadcast unattributed footage, much less introduce the IHLCAP Cell’s assessment only after the documentary has entrenched its sustained focus on Palestinian civilian suffering.
Channel 4 also fails to disclose who Roba Attallah (pictured below) is, or her history of pro-Palestinian activism. CAMERA’s research found that Attallah is a self-described Palestinian activist and writer who previously worked as a television presenter at An-Najah TV NBC, a public satellite television station based in Nablus. She has also been featured at events sponsored by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and the Palestinian Forum in Britain [see: here, here and here].
Screen grab of Channel 4’s Roba Attallah.
Attallah also follows a disproportionate amount of anti-Israel and Hamas-affiliated accounts (Image below). These include documented Hamas colonel Dr Hussam Abu Safiya; Ismail al-Ghoul and Hossam Shabat, both deceased Hamas operatives; and Wael al-Dadhouh, Al-Jazeera’s Gaza the Bureau Chief, who was arrested in 1989 during the first Palestinian Intifada, for serving in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
She also follows ‘Escobar_1issa,’ an account that uses the inverted red Hamas triangle in its profile name, which also posted a photo of an [unidentified] individual proudly holding a placard depicting a rifle and the Hamas inverted triangle, alongside the direct death threat: “لنرجعكم بتوابيت يا عرصات” [In English: “We will send you back in coffins, you bastards.”]
Screen grab of Attallah’s Instagram following list.
Although the accounts Attallah follows do not necessarily indicate endorsement, and may offer a convenient shield of plausible deniability, it is notable that they skew so distinctly toward Hamas-affiliated operatives and sympathisers.
Attallah’s social media activity is compounded by earlier posts in which she eulogised the “martyr Baha Alian” [AKA Baha Alyan] (Image below). Our research found that, in October 2015, the IDF killed Alyan after he murdered three Israelis in a stabbing attack on a bus in Armon HaNatziv, a fact Attallah blatantly omits.
Attallah’s Instagram post in which she eulogises “martyr” Baha Alian [AKA Aylan].
In a separate post (Image below), Attallah states that she and Nidal al-Waheidi, also an An-Najah NBC broadcaster, were “good friends” and had previously worked together. Al-Waheidi reportedly disappeared while reporting on Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Our research further revealed that, on the day of the Oct.7, 2023 attacks, al-Waheidi celebrated the attacks and the “resistance,” and asked, “who has the coordination, is it possible to film in Sderot?”
Given recent claims that a Hamas-run WhatsApp channel, ‘SMART’, coordinated media coverage among Gazan journalists during the attacks, it is quite possible that al-Wahedi intended to cross into Israel – especially given that Sderot lies less than a mile from Gaza.
Attallah’s text message exchanges with al-Waheidi and photos taken together in 2019.
On Facebook, Attallah has re-shared content from Motaz Azaiza [see: here], Hamas operative Anas al-Sharif [see: here], and has affectionately referred to Hamas colonel Dr Hussam Safiya as “beloved doctor” and “Uncle Abu Elias” [In Arabic: عمو أبو إلياس], indicating admiration for him (Image below).
Attalah’s Facebook photo of Dr Hussam Safiya, affectionately referring to him as “Uncle Abu Elias.”
Attallah’s Facebook post characterising Dr Hussam Safiya as her “beloved doctor.”
The more troubling question, therefore, is why Channel 4 failed to carry out proper due diligence. Attallah’s social media following is skewed, she has described Palestinian terrorists as “martyrs,” affectionately nicknamed a Hamas colonel, and she was, by her own account, “good friends” with a photojournalist who celebrated Hamas’ attacks and may himself have entered Israel that day. Why has Channel 4 not used dedicated OSINT teams to vet its contributors? Or does it know exactly who it is platforming and still not care?
Throughout the 49-minute-long segment, internal IHLCAP documents consistently state that Israel was not in breach of international law. Yet Channel 4 consistently interrupts these findings with tangential objections. When it cannot establish that the alleged airstrike on the Eilan family home amounted to a war crime, the programme moves swiftly to its next claim: the Israeli airstrike on the Al-Fakhouri school in November 2023 [08:22].
More troubling still, Channel 4 makes no reference to Hamas’ use of civilian infrastructure to conceal its weapons caches and tunnel shafts, or to rig improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Our research identified at least 33 schools used as Hamas command centres in 2023-24 alone, including the Amas Bin Malik and Al-Razi schools.
The programme also fails to clarify that the Al-Fakhouri school was run by UNWRA. This is a significant omission, given that at least 15% (over 450) of UNRWA’s senior educators in Gaza, across 60 UNRWA institutions, are members of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Nine UNWRA employees, plus two more in February, were also confirmed to have participated in the terrorist attacks on Oct.7, 2023.
After informing viewers that the IHLCAP Cell ruled that the Al-Fakhouri airstrike was “not a possible war crime,” Channel 4 turns to Professor William Schabas [09:34], an international law scholar who, as the programme itself acknowledges, has been accused of anti-Israel bias.
What Channel 4 fails to mention is that Schabas resigned in 2015 as head of the UN commission of inquiry into the 2014 Gaza conflict, after it had emerged that he had previously provided consultancy services to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). He has also repeatedly declined to describe Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
Still, it gets worse. Channel 4 then shows Schabas a montage of video footage and asks him to determine whether Israel had violated international law. The kicker? The footage, which Channel 4 failed to make clear to its viewers, belongs to Al-Jazeera.
In the image below, Al-Jazeera’s logo appears in the bottom right-hand corner of Schabas’ laptop screen. How can someone with an already documented anti-Israel bias objectively rule on Israel’s conduct when the footage comes from a Qatari-owned outlet with ties to Hamas whose journalists have overwhelmingly doubled as Hamas operatives? The IDF has previously identified least six Al-Jazeera journalists, including Hossam Shabat and Anas al-Sharif, as Hamas operatives.
Al-Jazeera logo at the bottom right-hand side of Schabas’ laptop screen.
CAMERA UK contacted the IDF to confirm the two airstrikes in question took place at all, and was told they were under review by the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism. Without full view of the facts, it is irresponsible for Channel 4 to manufacture certainty over claims it cannot corroborate.
At several points in the documentary, Channel 4 attributes video footage to social media accounts whose clearly anti-Israel output precludes any claim to impartiality, yet the programme presents them uncritically.
One example appears at [37:30] with footage attributed to Issa Amro (@issamro), co-founder of the group Youth Against Settlement in Hebron. Amro has repeatedly called for the release of Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti. He has also been photographed alongside Francesca Albanese, praised her work against “racist regimes,” and claimed that Israel has used Oct.7, 2023 attacks to “advance its fascist agenda.”
In another segment [37:40], Channel 4 attributes footage of Palestinian detainees to Chris Williamson (@DerbyChrisW), former MP to Derby North, who hosts of ‘Palestine Declassified,’ a weekly programme broadcast on the Iranian state-owned network Press TV and co-hosted with virulent antisemite David Miller. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has previously characterised ‘Palestine Declassified’ as a “foreign state hate operation,” and the programme deploys the well-worn antisemitic conspiratorial trope that Jews are conspiring for world domination.
Williamson’s X profile also contains a stream of inflammatory rhetoric. He has called for Israel to be “completely dismantled and de-zionised,” claimed that Britain is “occupied by the genocidal Zionist colony,” described Israel as the “world’s quintessential terrorist state.” Alarmingly, in a discussion of rising antisemitism in the UK, he argued that Britain should not “appease the genocidal Zionist lobby with the obligatory condemnation of Hamas and accept Zionist propaganda that antisemitism makes British Jews feel unsafe.”
Screen grab of Channel 4’s video segment attributed to Williamson.
Additional footage is attributed to Belal Abu Amer (@belalabuamer96) [41:00] and shown without context (Image below, left). Our research found that Abu Amer is a Gaza-based journalist for Al Ghad TV.
In August, he posted an Instagram video mourning the “tragedy” of the death of the “martyr” Ismail Abu al-Foul (Image below, right) but failed to mention that al-Foul was a commander at a weapons manufacturing site operating under Hamas’ production headquarters.
Screen grab of Channel 4’s attributed video footage vis-à-vis
Abu Amer’s Instagram post.
Conveniently, the video segments in Channel 4’s documentary have a cumulative effect that makes the footage’s origins hard for viewers to identify: some watermarks are barely visible, the segments follow one another without pause, and they are overlaid with narration that has no relevance to the footage.
Yet when the footage comes from overwhelmingly hostile accounts, what purpose does it serve other than to elicit an anti-Israel reaction? It is perhaps unsurprising that Channel 4 only includes the IDF’s statements at the [47:12] mark, in its concluding stages, almost as if they are unworthy of inclusion.
Channel 4’s documentary offers less a record of truth than a conspiratorial account of the UK’s ‘nefarious’ relationship with Israel. It presents that relationship as a series of shady dealings and hints that the UK has given preferential treatment in its arms exports. When its claims are unsupported or contradicted by the evidence, it deflects through whataboutism or presents the UK’s internal documents in a way that primes viewers to dismiss them as spurious.
In a documentary whose 49-minute running time references Hamas only once, glosses over the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks in its first two minutes, sources its video footage to Hamas sympathisers and platforms individuals with a history of activism and close rapport with Hamas operatives -without disclosing either- what, then, is Channel 4 really supporting?