In Gaza war documentary, BBC blurs lines between Israelis, Jews

A new BBC documentary about the Israel-Hamas war last summer chose to translate the word “Jews” as “Israelis” in its interviews with Palestinian children.

“Children of the Gaza War,” which aired on the UK’s largest television channel Wednesday evening, followed the lives of Israeli and Gazan children during and after the conflict.

However, a report in the Jewish Chronicle Wednesday noted that BBC producers chose to translate the Arabic word for Jew, Yahud, as Israelis.

Lyse Doucet, the network’s chief international correspondent who made the film, stood by the translation, asserting that the children interviewed in the documentary were certainly referring to Israelis.

In one instance, when a Palestinian boy says “the Yahud are massacring us,” the English subtitles read “Israel is massacring us.”

According to the report, Doucet said that Gazan translators recommended the use of the word Israelis, and said the children interviewed in the two-hour film meant Israelis

“We are not trying to cover it up – we took advice on it and that was the advice we were given by translators,” Doucet explained. “We felt it was a better translation of it.”

A number of critics accused the BBC of whitewashing Palestinian anti-Semitism to shield its viewers from Hamas’s extremist ideology. The terror group is committed to the destruction of Israel.

The documentary shows Palestinian children giving a tour of their bombed out neighborhoods, homes and schools. It also shows Israeli children living in Israel’s southern cities scrambling to run to bomb shelters when sirens sound.