Gary Lineker, Ruth Negga, Juliet Stevenson and Miriam Margolyes are among 500 film, TV and other media professionals calling on the BBC to reinstate its documentary on children and young people living in Gaza, describing it as an “essential piece of journalism”.
The broadcaster removed Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone from BBC iPlayer pending a “due diligence” exercise after it emerged that the film’s 14-year-old narrator was the son of a deputy agriculture minister in the territory’s Hamas-run government.
A letter, sent on Wednesday to the BBC executives Samir Shah, Tim Davie and Charlotte Moore and seen by the Guardian, describes the film as “an essential piece of journalism, offering an all-too-rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinians”.
Signatories included the former BBC One controller Danny Cohen, the former BBC governor Ruth Deech, the EastEnders actor Tracy-Ann Oberman and the Strike producer Neil Blair.
Critics of the programme, including dozens of prominent Jewish journalists, condemned a failure of commissioning standards and questioned whether the BBC had paid any member of Hamas as part of the filming of the documentary.
