‘Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone' Gets Hundreds Of Complaints Amid BBC Investigation Into Hamas Links
The BBC has received more than 600 audience complaints about Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone, the scandal-engulfed documentary with links to the Hamas regime.
The British broadcaster's fortnightly complaints log has revealed that it received 611 messages from viewers who felt the Hoyo Films documentary was 'biased against Israel' and 'failed to explore potential connections with Hamas.'
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Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone premiered on February 17 and chronicled the experience of children living their lives amid a brutal conflict after the events of October 7. The film failed to declare, however, that its English-speaking narrator, Abdullah Al-Yazouri, was the son of Ayman Al-Yazouri, the deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza's Hamas-run government.
Hoyo Films knew about Al-Yazouri's Hamas links but did not disclose them to the BBC. The BBC has since removed Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone from iPlayer, with chairman Samir Shah describing the film as a 'dagger to the heart' of the BBC's claims to trustworthiness and impartiality.
Peter Johnston, the BBC's director of editorial complaints and reviews, is overseeing an in-depth editorial investigation into the editorial failings that led to the documentary being broadcast.
'This is a really bad moment,' Shah told lawmakers last week. 'What has been revealed is a dagger to the heart of the BBC's claim to be impartial and trustworthy, which is why I and the board are determined to answer the questions being asked.' The BBC board is 'very exercized' by the scandal and 'we will get to the bottom of this and take appropriate actions,' added Shah.
The decision to remove the film followed a group of 45 Jewish television executives, including former BBC content chief Danny Cohen and J.K. Rowling's agent Neil Blair, writing letters to the BBC raising questions about How To Survive a Warzone, including that two other children featured had Hamas links.
The BBC has also come under pressure from Palestinian sympathizers, including Gary Lineker, Riz Ahmed, and Ken Loach, who have described the decision to remove the film from iPlayer as 'censorship.' In a letter signed by hundreds, they said: 'Conflating such governance roles in Gaza with terrorism is both factually incorrect and dehumanising. This broad-brush rhetoric assumes that Palestinians holding administrative roles are inherently complicit in violence — a racist trope that denies individuals their humanity and right to share their lived experiences.'
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In The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls spent four and a half hours of screen time – and many more hours of shooting – staking out the city of Clermont-Ferrand 'to analyse four years of collective destiny'. Patiently hearing from residents of all walks of life, the film picked insistently away at the Gaullist myth of a country united against an occupier, instead revealing two Frances at odds with one another – one resisting, the other collaborating. In France, Sorrow was denounced by conservative politicians as 'a prosecutorial film' and initially rejected for both theatrical and television distribution. After much legal wrangling, it finally opened in 1971, earning an Oscar nomination the following year, but it did not air on French television until 1981; a station director said the film had 'destroyed myths the French people still needed'. Ophuls subsequently made films on Vietnam (The Harvest of My Lai, 1970) and the Irish Troubles (A Sense of Loss, 1972), though the latter was rejected by the BBC. His personal favourite, The Memory of Justice, revisited the Nuremberg trials in the context of more recent conflicts in Algeria and Vietnam, though the project was again beset by lengthy and expensive legal challenges; Ophuls filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter and spent a decade on the lecture circuit. He made a triumphant return, however, with the Oscar-winning Hôtel Terminus, on the life of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. As free-roaming as its subject, unearthing material both disturbing and absurd, the film ends in one of documentary cinema's most extraordinary sequences, as Ophuls witnesses a chance encounter between a woman who as a child had seen her father carted away by the Gestapo and an elderly neighbour who had turned a blind eye to the same events. Though Hôtel Terminus sparked violent arguments at Cannes, the critic Roger Ebert admired its tenacity, calling it 'the film of a man who continues the conversation after others would like to move on to more polite subjects'. Yet as a characteristically combative Ophuls countered in 2004: 'I'm not obsessed. I just happen to think that the Holocaust was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century. Think I'm wrong?' He was born Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt on November 1 1927, the son of Max Oppenheimer and his actress wife Hildegard Wall. The family fled Germany for France in 1933, taking French citizenship in 1938, whereupon Max dropped the umlaut from his stage name, Ophüls; after the occupation they fled anew to Los Angeles, where Max began an unhappy spell as a studio filmmaker and Marcel attended Hollywood High and Occidental College. Marcel Ophuls completed military service in Japan before studying at UC Berkeley, taking US citizenship in 1950. Upon graduation he moved to Paris, briefly studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, before dropping out and working as an assistant director (initially under the pseudonym Marcel Wall, to dodge nepotism accusations) on John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father's sweeping Lola Montès (1955). He made his directorial debut with a German television adaptation of John Mortimer's The Dock Brief (Das Pflichtmandat, 1958), before being tapped by François Truffaut to contribute to the portmanteau film Love at Twenty (L'amour à vingt ans, 1962). By now he was part of the New Wave set: Jeanne Moreau funded his detective comedy Banana Skin (Peau de Banane, 1963), but his fiction career came to a halt after the flop thriller Place Your Bets, Ladies (Faites vos jeux, mesdames, 1965). Ophuls moved into documentary, taking a job with the French broadcaster ORTF, where he railed against the prevailing state censorship; he was eventually fired in May 1968 after making a film deemed sympathetic to the student rioters, though by then he was well into post-production on The Sorrow and the Pity. After Hôtel Terminus, Ophuls suffered mixed fortunes. November Days (1990), on the subject of German reunification, played as part of the BBC's Inside Story strand, but The Troubles We've Seen (Veillées d'armes, 1994), on wartime journalism and the Bosnian conflict, failed to reach an audience, despite a César nomination in France. He worked more sparingly in the new millennium, completing Max par Marcel (2009), on his father's legacy, and the career overview Ain't Misbehavin' (Un voyageur, 2013), his final completed film; a later project on anti-Semitism and the Middle East, Des vérités désagréables (Unpleasant Truths), ran into financial and legal troubles and remained unfinished at the time of his death. During a visit to Israel in 2007, Ophuls attempted to define his life's work: 'I'm not a preacher, a judge or an adviser. I'm just a filmmaker trying now and then to make sense of crises... Life made me, unwillingly, an expert on 20th-century crises. I would've preferred to direct musicals.' He is survived by his wife Regine, née Ackermann, and three daughters. Marcel Ophuls, born November 1 1927, died May 24 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
