BBC drops film about Gaza doctors after delaying its broadcast for months
The BBC has announced it has dropped a film about doctors working in Gaza after delaying its broadcast for months.
The documentary, Gaza: Medics Under Fire, was ready to broadcast in February but was pulled because of a scandal that erupted over another BBC documentary on children in Gaza, entitled How to Survive a Warzone.
Britain's public broadcaster said it would broadcast Gaza: Medics Under Fire after the review into the earlier documentary was concluded.
But on Friday, the BBC announced it would not air the film.
"We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC," the broadcaster said in a statement.
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"Therefore, we are transferring ownership of the film material to Basement Films... Any film broadcast will not be a BBC film."
'No moral or professional reason'
Basement Films, the company which produced the documentary, had previously questioned the BBC's decision to delay the broadcast, saying, "there is no moral or professional reason why a mistake in one film should repeatedly prevent the release of another film."
In a statement on Friday, Basement Films said: "we would like to thank the Doctors and contributors and survivors, and to apologise for not believing them when they said the BBC would never run a film like this.
"It turned out they were right."
The documentary tells the stories of Palestinian doctors working in Gaza under Israeli bombardment and was made by Oscar-nominated, Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmakers, including Ben de Pear, Karim Shah and Ramita Navai.
The BBC did not explain in its statement why the film would not have met "the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC".
Basement Films said that the BBC "gave us no less than 6 different release dates" after having "told us several times verbally and by email" that the film "had been approved for broadcast".
In May, over 600 prominent figures from the arts and media wrote to the BBC, accusing it of "political censorship" over its delay in screening the documentary.
"Although the BBC are now taking their names off this film," Basement Films said, "it will remain theirs, and we hope it serves to open up the debate on how the nation's broadcaster covers what is happening in Gaza."
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