BBC Reporter’s History of Glorifying Murder of Jews

A BBC Arabic reporter who wrongly described terrorists killed in Gaza as “journalists” has a history of glorifying the murder of Jewish people. The Telegraph has the story.

Layla Bashar al-Kloub has described Israel’s Jewish population as “terrorists” and asked Allah to “strengthen” a Palestinian TV presenter who had been labelled a Holocaust denier.

She has also described Palestinians who have been killed after murdering Israelis as “martyrs”.

Last month, the Telegraph reported allegations of BBC bias after finding that 53 people it had described as “journalists” killed in Gaza had links to Hamas or other armed groups.

Some were alleged to have taken part in the October 7th attacks, while others had expressed support for violence against Israelis or been claimed as members by militant organisations.

The BBC responded by saying it was reviewing its coverage after the new findings.

Most of the names appeared on a list compiled by al-Kloub, which was first published on the BBC Arabic website in 2023 and was updated periodically.

By the time al-Kloub wrote the list, she had an established history of anti-Israeli posts on social media.

In 2014, she wrote on social media to an Israeli citizen that “before 1948 it was Palestine, before YOU (Terrorists) came to our land”, adding: “There’s no problem for us to die for Palestine, you don’t, because it’s NOT YOURS.”

Two years later, she tweeted: “The Zionist entity does not recognise any international law or agreement, their entire [legal] proceedings are infringements of human rights treaties. They are the terrorists, not us.”

In 2017, she suggested that Israel should not exist by posting that the land “from the river to the sea” – referring to the whole of Israel and the Palestinian territories – was “Arab, Arab, Arab”.

In 2018 and 2019, she described Ahmad Jarrar and Omar Abu Leila as “martyrs”. Both had murdered Jewish civilians before being killed.

In 2021, she paid tribute to Muna Hawwa, a Palestinian presenter at Al Jazeera who was disciplined by the channel after producing and sharing a video on X asking: “How true is the #Holocaust and how did the Zionists benefit from it?” Hawwa contested claims that she was a Holocaust denier.

She was banned by social media platforms but was later allowed to rejoin, prompting al-Kloub to write: “My dear Muna … there was a great victory for you, yourself specifically, the free word, and the victory of exquisite journalism, you have proved [to] everybody you are capable of confronting large institutions by yourself, may Allah strengthen you.”

In April last year, the British Council gave her an award for being part of the BBC Arabic team that led the coverage of the war in Gaza.

Yet dozens of the “journalists” that had been killed in Gaza were members of Hamas and other terrorist organisations.

They included Abdullah Darwish, who was described by BBC Arabic as “a cameraman for Al-Aqsa TV”.

He was later removed from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) list after it emerged he had participated in the October 7th attacks as a member of Hamas’s Al-Qassam brigades. He had also been photographed wearing the unit’s distinctive green headband.

He was killed in a targeted air strike in December 2023.

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