BBC ‘cut line from Oct 7 massacre documentary calling Hamas terrorists’

The BBC has been criticised for airing a documentary about the Oct 7 Nova music festival massacre without describing Hamas as terrorists.

This week, the corporation showed a different version of the acclaimed 90-minute film, Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again, to the original one aired in America and around the world.

It features a chronological reconstruction of the massacre, in which more than 360 were murdered, using footage recorded by both victims and Hamas terrorists, interspersed with survivor interviews.

In the original, the opening title states: “The IDF says that 3,000 terrorists breached the 40-mile-long border …”

However, this does not appear in the BBC version.

The corporation has come under heavy criticism in the last year for refusing to refer to Hamas as terrorists, despite the group being designated terrorists by dozens of countries.

A spokesman for the Campaign Against Antisemitism described the BBC’s decisions around airing the documentary as “shameful”.

“The BBC not only declines to call Hamas terrorists itself but it censors others from doing so as well,” they said.

The BBC said the film carried multiple descriptions of the Islamist group as terrorists directly from survivors.

However, in an interview with Hollywood Reporter last week, Yariv Mozer, the award-winning director behind the documentary, said: “The BBC, the version they’ll air won’t describe Hamas as terrorists.

“It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public would be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organisation or not.”

The filmmakers worked with more than twenty survivors of the festival, filming their testimonies about their own ordeal and that of friends who were killed.

Mozer has previously made films about Adolf Eichmann, a senior Israeli general, and about gay Palestinians.

He attended a screening of the Nova documentary film in London last week, which was also attended by prominent BBC figures, at which he thanked the corporation for getting behind the documentary.

However, the CAS spokesman said: “A filmmaker making a film about the massacre of music festival-goers by a proscribed antisemitic genocidal organisation is prevented from calling them terrorists? It defies reason.

“This approach does not represent accuracy and impartiality, but the very opposite. Our national broadcaster is putting its thumb on the scales.

‘The British public should be able to expect better”.

The directors took the decision to blur victims’ faces after they were hit while showing the atrocities committed by Hamas.

Mozer has stressed that the film is apolitical.

Its opening title states that: “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” adding: “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”

The film depicts the Hamas assault beginning at the climax of the trance party, with survivors candidly recounting the added confusion many of them suffered having recently taken drugs.

A statement by the BBC said: “The BBC Storyville film shows in unsparing detail the way in which Hamas set out to slaughter as many people as possible at a music festival on Oct 7. It is entirely focused on their stories, told in their own words without commentary, and their descriptions of Hamas as a terrorist organisation have of course not been changed.”

It said the editorial guidelines regarding labelling groups or people as terrorists had been in place for many years.