THE BBC is facing questions on its reluctance to report Donald Trump’s call for a “clean out” of Gaza as a call for ethnic cleansing.
The broadcaster, along with swathes of other Western media, has often used other terms to imply ethnic cleansing without explicitly saying it.
In one report, the BBC said Trump had put forward a “proposal to take over Gaza and move its population of two million Palestinians”.
In a second, it said that the US president had “said the two million Palestinians who would be resettled in neighbouring countries under his plan to take over and rebuild the Gaza Strip would have no right of return”.
And appearing on BBC News, Yolande Knell, the broadcaster’s Middle East correspondent, also avoided using the term.
“President Trump’s pronouncements have not helped here,” she said. “In particular his vision of a post-war Gaza where its residents have been cleared out, where there’s a US take over there, to develop it into a sort of Mediterranean travel destination.”
Sharing a clip of Knell online, Saul Staniforth said that she had been continuing “to avoid calling Trump’s plan what it is – ethnic cleansing”.
Journalist and academic Assal Rad also called out the BBC in other examples. One, from BBC Verify, was headlined: “Can Trump really take ownership of Gaza?”
Rad wrote: “What an odd way to frame ethnic cleansing and clear violations of international law.”
Framing ETHNIC CLEANSING as voluntary migration is propaganda, not news. BBC is a disgrace. https://t.co/0qlGVUdzeO
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) February 6, 2025
And under the headline “Trump’s real-estate instincts clash with his America first worldview”, Rad wrote: “Did BBC really just refer to ethnic cleansing as ‘real-estate instincts’??”
Elsewhere, she added: “Framing ethnic cleansing as voluntary migration is propaganda, not news. BBC is a disgrace.”
Gerry Coutts, from the Glasgow-Bethlehem Twinning Association, told The National: “A vision of a post-war Gaza where indigenous habitants of the land ‘have been cleared out’ is called ethnic cleansing. This is what it has always been called.
“Yet, in a desperate bid to protect Israel, a genocidal illegal occupation, you have the BBC bending over backwards to shield Israel and Trump of their attempts to further brutalise occupied Palestinians by avoiding any reference to ethnic cleansing and genocide.”
Coutts added: "Last year, over a 100 BBC staff accused the BBC of giving Israel favourable coverage in its reporting of the war on Gaza and criticised it for the lack of ‘accurate evidence-based journalism’.
"We see what’s happening and see the efforts by the BBC, a once respected media outlet throughout the world getting tangled repeatedly as it works hard to whitewash Israel’s crimes.”
France24 on Friday published a video examining the reticence of the global media to call Trump's plans ethnic cleansing. "Why? Was it poor taste, bad judgment or something else?" the outlet asked.
The BBC did not respond to a request for a response.
