Channel 4 News has admitted the son of a Hamas official featured in parts of its daily coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
The appearance of the son of Ayman Alyazouri – who has worked as Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture – follows an ongoing controversy within the BBC.
The BBC’s chair Samir Shah told MPs on Tuesday that a BBC documentary which included 13-year-old Abdullah al Yazouri was a “really, really bad moment” and “a dagger to the heart” to the organisation’s impartiality.
On Tuesday, Channel 4 issued a statement to confirm Abdullah has also appeared in “three short news segments for the programme”, although it represented only a “handful of minutes across hundreds of hours” of output.
“Abdullah al Yazouri did categorically not appear in any documentary broadcast on Channel 4” but did appear “alongside other voices, including Israeli voices, as part of wider packaging and reporting… and in line with our principles of due impartiality,” the broadcaster said.
Channel 4 said no payment was made to the boy or any of his family members, and that, once the foreign reporting team became aware of the role the boy’s father held, they “took a decision not to feature him again”.
“Action was taken to provide additional context to the archived online copy of the reports in which Abdullah features.
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“Where context could not be added, namely to social media, the content was removed in line with standard editorial procedures.”
The broadcaster added it is “proud of its duly impartial coverage throughout the conflict” in Gaza and “has upheld the highest editorial standards”.
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Last year, Channel 4 News was named news programme of the year at the annual Royal Television Society (RTS) awards.
RTS said the broadcaster had assured it that no video material featuring Abdullah al Yazouri was featured in their awards entries and it “had no plans to revoke the awards”.
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Last week, the BBC issued an apology and removed the documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone from iPlayer, saying it had “identified serious flaws” in the making of the programme, which included Abdullah as narrator.
A statement from the corporation added that a full “fact-finding review” will be undertaken, and that it has “no plans to broadcast the programme again in its current form or return it to iPlayer”.
Last week, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy called an “urgent meeting” with the corporation over the film.
