BBC settles with October 7 attack survivors after filming home ‘without permission’

The BBC says it has reached a settlement with an Israeli family who survived Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel after a news crew filmed inside their destroyed home.

The crew, which included senior correspondent Jeremy Bowen, entered the Horenstein family’s home in the days after the attacks in 2023.

“While we do not generally comment on specific legal issues we are pleased to have reached an agreement in this case,” a BBC spokesperson says.

Tzeela and Simon Horenstein and their two young children survived the attack when a door the Hamas terrorists tried to blast open twisted and jammed.

But at the time the news crew filmed in their wrecked home many of the family’s friends and relatives did not know if they were alive.

Tzeela Horenstein tells the UK Jewish News that not only had the terrorists tried to break into their home and murder them “but then the BBC crew entered again, this time with a camera as a weapon, without permission or consent.”

This second “intrusion” had left the family feeling as if “everything that was still under our control had been taken from us,” she adds.

The BBC has reportedly agreed to pay the family £28,000 ($37,000), according to the Jewish News.