The entrance to BBC Broadcasting House in London after a pro-Palestinian group threw red paint on the doors in protest at its reporting on the genocide in Gaza

London, March 19 (RHC)-- The BBC is set to investigate staff social media use after a reporter “liked” posts slamming Israel as a “genocidal” regime and supporting Palestinians’ right to resist the Israeli occupation.  

The BBC said it treats breach of its social media guidelines, which require strict impartiality from staff, extremely seriously, and will “investigate each case in detail.”  “As we have said previously, we take allegations of breaches of our social media guidance very seriously and we took urgent action to investigate each case in detail,” a spokesman for the broadcaster said.

“We do not comment on individual staff matters, however, if we find breaches we take the appropriate action.”  

It came as the BBC Arabic reporter Soha Ibrahim “liked” a string of posts on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, including a post immediately after the October 7 Operation Al-Aqsa Storm which likened members of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas to “freedom fighters.”

She also liked a video that said Israel was aiming to carry out “massacres”, as well as several posts saying Israel was carrying out a “genocide.”  Among the posts that she liked was one from Jeremy Corbyn defending pro-Palestine rallies taking place across the UK, in which the former Labor leader stated, “Protesting against the mass slaughter of civilians is not a threat to democracy.”

The London-based journalist even liked a post that decried her own employer, the BBC, for not properly covering the aggression on Gaza.

Ibrahim helped on a story headlined “Gaza medics tell BBC that Israeli troops beat and humiliated them after hospital raid” in which Palestinian medical staff said they were blindfolded, beaten and stripped by the regime’s forces.

BBC has, however, insisted on the accuracy of the story, with the broadcaster’s spokesman saying “We stand by our journalism.”  That came as Camera, an organization that seeks to monitor media coverage of Israel, has raised concerns about BBC staffing.

Earlier this month, the Center for Media Monitoring (CFMM) said in a report titled “Media Bias Gaza 2023-24” that the British media had failed to represent the conflict in Gaza in a fair manner.  The study analyzed data from 28 UK online media websites for a period of one month starting from October 7, 2023.