“Given that you dropped the film, will you drop us from the BAFTA screening later tonight?”
Home Affairs Correspondent
The BBC faced fresh embarrassment at the BAFTA TV Awards after a Gaza documentary it shelved won a major prize — only for the filmmakers to accuse the broadcaster of censorship during their acceptance speech.
Channel 4’s Gaza: Doctors Under Attack won the Current Affairs award on May 10, reigniting criticism over the BBC’s decision to drop the film last year over concerns about impartiality.
Accepting the award, journalist and filmmaker Ramita Navai delivered a scathing rebuke of the broadcaster, saying the documentary exposed the deaths and detention of Palestinian medical workers in Gaza — findings she said the BBC had “paid for and refused to show.”
“We refused to be silenced and censored,” Navai told the audience to loud applause. The documentary was originally commissioned by the BBC before executives pulled it in June 2025, arguing the programme risked creating “a perception of partiality” that could undermine trust in the corporation’s journalism.
After the BBC dropped the film, Channel 4 stepped in to air the documentary, which focuses on the experiences of doctors and healthcare workers caught up in the war in Gaza. The controversy intensified during the BAFTA ceremony when executive producer Ben de Pear directly challenged the BBC from the stage.
“Given that you dropped the film, will you drop us from the BAFTA screening later tonight?” he asked. Because the ceremony was broadcast on a two-hour delay, speculation quickly mounted over whether the BBC would edit out the criticism.
The broadcaster ultimately aired parts of the acceptance speech on BBC One, including de Pear’s pointed remarks, although some of Navai’s comments and allegations concerning Israel’s actions were reportedly removed from the final broadcast.
The fallout is the latest chapter in a prolonged dispute surrounding the documentary. The BBC had initially paused the film while conducting a review into another Gaza-related programme, Gaza: How To Survive a War Zone, after controversy emerged over the narrator’s family connections to a Hamas official.
Executives later abandoned Doctors Under Attack altogether, citing impartiality concerns that reportedly included public remarks by Navai describing Israel as “a rogue state.”
At the time, the BBC defended its decision, stating: “Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world’s most trusted broadcaster.”
The documentary’s producers strongly rejected the move, insisting the film had undergone extensive fact-checking and multiple compliance reviews before being abruptly shelved despite several scheduled release dates.
Speaking backstage after the BAFTA win, de Pear praised the Gaza-based journalists who worked on the production, saying the team feared daily for their safety amid the conflict.
“We woke up every day wondering if they were still alive,” he said.
