‘We’ll burn Jews like Hitler did’, says BBC’s reporter in Gaza

A journalist who appears prominently on the BBC’s Arabic channel to report from Gaza called for Jews to be burned “as Hitler did”, it can be revealed.

Samer Elzaenen has appeared on BBC Arabic more than a dozen times since the conflict erupted following the October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel. He reported live last month and his dispatches have included reports from the Nuseirat refugee camp in June last year, after an Israeli military operation to rescue four hostages, held by Hamas, led to hundreds of Palestinian deaths.

It has now emerged that Elzaenen, 33, has issued a stream of social media posts which single out Jews for condemnation and even appear to call for violence against them.

In a Facebook post in July 2022, he stated: “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything.”

Elzaenen has also appeared to call for a repeat of the Holocaust, stating on Facebook in May 2011: “My message to the Zionist Jews: We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.”

Elsewhere on social media, he has posted a hashtag stating: “#We Are All Hamas You Son of a Jewess”

Elzaenen’s social media output over the past decade has included endorsements of more than 30 separate attacks against Jewish civilians in Israel, calling the actions “blessed” and “heroic”; describing the perpetrators and “heroes” and “martyrs” who “ascended” to “heaven”; and appearing to express joy at the victims’ deaths.

Commenting on a February 2023 attack in which a Palestinian terrorist killed two boys aged eight and six and a 20-year-old man, after ramming his car into a bus stop in Jerusalem, Elzaenen said the victims “will soon go to hell”.

The Palestinian journalist has also repeatedly described the Hamas terrorists who carried out the October 7 attacks as “resistance fighters”, including those who targeted young music fans at the Nova festival.

Ahmed Qannan, another regular BBC Arabic freelance contributor, appears to have expressed his hope that Israelis wounded in a shooting near a Jerusalem synagogue, which claimed the lives of seven civilians on Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2023, would also die.  Writing on Facebook in response to a friend who stated “We want to see some throats cut”, Qannan replied: “Don’t give up on your ambition”.

BBC sources emphasised that Elzaenen and Qannan were not members of staff. A BBC spokesman said: “International journalists including the BBC are not allowed access into Gaza so we hear from a range of eyewitness accounts from the strip. These are not BBC members of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team. We were not aware of the individuals’ social media activity prior to hearing from them on air. We are absolutely clear that there is no place for anti-Semitism on our services.”

But the broadcaster’s use of them as freelance contributors representing the corporation has been condemned by media watchers, who accuse BBC Arabic, part of the BBC’s World Service, of anti-Israel bias.