Gazan journalist who appears on BBC Arabic called to ‘burn’ Jews in resurfaced posts
UK broadcaster attempts to distance itself from Samer Elzaenen, who has said shooting Jews ‘fixes everything,’ stating that he isn’t a staff member while disavowing antisemitism
A slew of antisemitic social media posts attributed to a Gazan journalist who regularly contributes to BBC Arabic were uncovered on Saturday, including one in which he called to “burn the Jews as Hitler did.”
Samer Elzaenen, 33, was uploading antisemitic and anti-Israel content to social media as far back as 2011, The Telegraph revealed, and continued even after he began providing correspondence for BBC Arabic in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led onslaught in southern Israel and the start of the Gaza war.
In a Facebook post in 2011, Elzaenen wrote: “My message to the Zionist Jews: We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake, the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.”
Then, more than a decade later in 2022, he wrote: “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything.”
According to the British newspaper, Elzaenen has praised over 30 separate terror attacks against Israeli civilians, including a February 2023 car-ramming attack that killed two boys and a 20-year-old man in Jerusalem.
The victims, he said at the time, “will soon go to hell.”
A journalist prominently featured by BBC Arabic has openly called for Jews to be burned “as Hitler did.”
His name: Samer Elzaenen.
Here’s the horrifying reality the BBC doesn’t want to talk about…???? pic.twitter.com/hbN9by8Bnj
— Jonathan Sacerdoti (@jonsac) April 26, 2025
In the aftermath of the October 7 assault, in which some 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and 251 were seized as hostages, Elzaenen praised the Hamas “resistance fighters” who led the onslaught.
According to the Telegraph, Elzaenen has appeared on BBC Arabic more than a dozen times since the start of the war in Gaza, which erupted when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst through the border into Israel on October 7, 2023, killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and seized 251 hostages.
Elzaenen subsequently praised the “resistance fighters” who led the massacres.
In the same report, the Telegraph also uncovered remarks posted on social media by a second freelance reporter and correspondent for BBC Arabic, Ahmed Qannan, who praised the “hero” terrorist who opened fire in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak in March 2022, killing five people.
The Telegraph said that the two journalists’ social media posts were unearthed by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).
In response to the uncovered social media posts, a BBC spokesperson told the Telegraph that Elzaenen and Qannan are not employees of the company. Rather, the spokesperson said, the BBC uses “a range of eyewitness accounts from the Strip,” since its journalists are not allowed to enter amid the war.
“These are not BBC members of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team,” the spokesperson said. “We were not aware of the individuals’ social media activity prior to hearing from them on air. We are absolutely clear that there is no place for antisemitism on our services.”
The BBC has faced heavy scrutiny over the past 18 months for what many perceive to be an anti-Israel slant to its coverage of the war in Gaza.
In February, the news service was forced to apologize after it emerged that a new documentary titled “Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone” had been narrated by the son of Hamas’s former deputy minister of agriculture.
BBC chair Samir Shah said at the time that the documentary was a “dagger to the heart” of the broadcaster’s impartiality, and vowed that “appropriate action” would be taken.
Amid the backlash over the documentary, Shah was pulled into a meeting with UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, who stressed to the public that “no stone will be left unturned” when investigating how the documentary came to be.
More widely, the BBC has been criticized for its refusal to describe Hamas as terrorists, even though the group’s military wing is proscribed by the United Kingdom as such, and even after the widespread documentation of its systematic targeting of civilians on October 7, 2023.
A spokesperson for the news service has previously said that it avoids labeling any group as terrorists unless quoting remarks by others, as it is a charged word, and thus goes against the broadcaster’s efforts at objective reporting.
The Times of Israel Community.