On Oct. 7, Sky News broadcast a news segment titled: ‘Why the October 7 attacks will change lives for generations,” in which Middle East correspondent Adam Parsons gave just one minute of its 3:43 running time to the Israeli victims of Hamas’ attacks before moving swiftly to Gaza. This is a broadcaster whose editorial line has repeatedly spread falsehoods, decontextualised truths, and which entrenches its focus on Palestinian civilian suffering all year round. It is therefore suspect that on the third anniversary of Hamas’ attacks, the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the only space dedicated to Israeli victims was inverted and co-opted by “the other side” and the “bigger picture” narratives.
From the outset, Parsons states that [1:18]:
It [Israel] became yet more focused on national security. The voices of the far-right and nationalist politicians sounded even louder.
Whilst Israel’s securitised posture is widely discussed amongst Israel’s far-right cabinet, it is misleading to suggest that its response to Hamas’ attacks is solely the product of far-right machinations. Had Sky News cared to explain how Hamas exploits asymmetric advantages (its entrenchment within civilian infrastructure, its expansive tunnel network, and its use of human shields), viewers might have been better equipped to understand Israel’s response, not as the product of far-right suppositions, but as a reaction to a multi-front threat.
Parsons then cites Hamas’ casualty figures immediately and without qualification [1:24]:
Israel focused its military might on a war in Gaza that brought back the hostages, but which has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians and attracted international criticism.
Many media outlets and international organisations have sanitised the reality around Hamas by routinely reproducing figures by the so-called “Gaza Health Ministry.” Ironically, Parsons does not even attribute them.
The pronouncement by Hamas of the number of deaths in Gaza is given greater credence than what the evidence supports. Hamas does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. The toll therefore includes combatants, whom the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) puts at upwards of 25,000 Hamas and affiliated combatants.
In Salo Aizenberg’s 2025 analysis, 11,000 of the stated deaths may be natural, in line with pre-war mortality patterns. A further 4,000 are likely the result of internal violence between rival factions, including shootings of civilians at aid sites and executions. Once these are subtracted from the stated total, civilian deaths could fall to roughly 30,000 giving a potential civilian-to-combatant ratio of 1.45.
The same day, Sky News Today overlaid footage of the memorial for the victims murdered at the Nova Festival with Parsons’ narration of the same oft-cited figure of 70,000 alleged deaths, along with claims that a “rhetoric of retribution” had been “inflamed by far-right politicians” (See below) [03:05-03:28].
Even more concerning, Parsons gives viewers a lesson in victim-blaming and obfuscation [04:36]:
The Nova Festival was not really supposed to be going on, on October 7th. It was originally supposed to have finished on October 6th. It was only just before that the organisers asked for permission to extend it. They were given it reluctantly. And so, if that permission hadn’t come, there would have been almost been nobody at Nova, and both the UN and Israel’s own investigations concluded that Hamas didn’t know what it was going to run into, it didn’t know there would be these hundreds of people.
And frankly, there is a very similar parallel universe. Where these people weren’t there, where they weren’t killed, Hamas fighters who were coming through Nova were going to other targets. It was only when they saw what was happening that they changed and they attacked.
Whether or not Hamas targeted the Nova opportunistically, the Israel Defence Force’s decision to approve a one-day extension did not murder civilians at the Music Nova Festival, Hamas did.
Unbeknownst to Parsons, he reveals Hamas’ barbarism: even if Hamas had not planned to murder civilians at Nova, they did so anyway, and they did so gleefully. One need only recall the images of Hamas operatives jeering and parading -among others- the body of Shani Louk. What are the “other targets” Parsons so euphemistically alludes to? The civilians of the kibbutzim? It is well-documented that Hamas did not only attack military targets. Does he mean to imply that those deaths were planned, and therefore less grave?
This is not an isolated incident: Sky News has shown a broader pattern of erasing Hamas from the October 7th massacre.
In its 2025 segment, on the second anniversary of Hamas’ attacks, Parsons chronicled the massacre of the Kibbutz Nir Or, replete with photographs and graphic, sensory passages. Yet he offered no hedging or attribution:
In total, 117 people, more than a quarter of those who were there that morning, were either killed or kidnapped. No other kibbutz suffered such a high proportion of casualties.
Killed by whom? Kidnapped by whom? Contrast this, for example, with the segment’s concluding stages, where Parsons only too readily deploys active constructions and attributes Palestinian civilian suffering – without question- to Israel’s perceived onslaught. Yet, in the same breath, he cannot afford Israeli victims the same courtesy.
Whilst Parsons does describe Kibbutz Niz Or as a “massacre” and references Hamas four times independently, outside of directly cited testimonies, he disappears the culpability of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in discussion of Oded Lifshitz’s murder:
Yocheved was eventually released after 16 days as a hostage, but Oded died in captivity. His body was not returned until earlier this year, but he had probably died a year earlier.
To say Lifshitz’s “died in captivity” obscures the record: he did not succumb to his injuries sustained during his abduction; he was murdered by the PIJ. The claim that he “probably” died a year earlier is not only factually inaccurate but also negligent, particularly as the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) confirmed in February 2025, seven months before Sky News’ broadcast aired, that he was murdered in November 2023.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs also kept updating its Sworn of Iron causalities until December 2025, and still Sky News has made no revision. How can Sky News attribute Palestinian civilian deaths to Israel with such precision and certainty it cannot verify, yet disregard Israeli victims so callously? Are they merely an inconvenient footnote in the broader narrative of Palestinian suffering?
Later in the segment, Sky News introduces a Palestinian woman reportedly from Khan Younis, identified only as “Sabah” (Image below, left) whom CAMERA UK later identified as Sabah al-Qarra [AKA al-Qara OR Alqraa] (Image below, right).
Screen grab of Sky News’ “Sabah” vis-à-vis Sabah al-Qarra’s Facebook page.
al-Qarra frames “the other side” narrative in which the atrocities of October 7th are given a moral veneer:
She insists that this story is not just about October 7, not just about Hamas, but about decades of struggle that led to this point, about Palestinian anger and accusations that they are oppressed by Israel.
“This goes back generations. What happened on October 7 was not the beginning of the story. I remember my father, my grandfather, and their fathers before them telling what they had endured. We have lived our entire lives under this weight.”
Al-Qarra tries to place October 7th on a different moral plane by invoking the Palestinian people’s generational “struggle” and their “oppression” by Israel. By quoting al-Qarra without context or pushback, Sky News sanitises Oct.7 revisionism and confers it legitimacy. Rather than state a view openly, the broadcaster selects a quote that carries that view for it, letting a third-party say what its editorial voice will not.
Sky News also leaves unchallenged al-Qarra’s claim that Palestinians are living through “hundreds of October 7ths” themselves:
“This land is ours, our homeland. We did not buy it. It has been passed down from our ancestors, generation to generation. That is why it is not easy for me, or for any of us, to surrender it.
“The truth is that we are exhausted. We are an oppressed people. October 7 was just one day, but for us, it has felt like living through hundreds of October 7th’s, over and over again.”
By setting the slaughter of Israeli civilians against the background of what is termed Palestinian “oppression,” al-Qarra encourages moral disengagement from Hamas’ terrorist actions through attribution of blame to its victims. In this semantic inversion, it is Palestinians who, according to al-Qarra, are the “oppressed people.” At no point does she condemn Hamas, and such silence invites readers to draw the unspoken conclusion that the group’s injurious and immoral actions were legitimate and even heroic.
Revealingly, by giving someone who does not condemn Hamas a platform, Sky News affords al-Qarra the space to compare Hamas’ violence against the alleged but unreal genocide perpetuated by Israel. In so doing, it complicitly primes readers to see the former as less grave and less condemnable and appropriates the moral weight of genocide accusations to delegitimise Israel’s military response.
This matters all the more given the polling. In 2023-2024, the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey (PCPSR) found that most Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank do not believe Hamas committed any atrocities on October 7th. In Dec. 2023, 72 per cent of Palestinians said Hamas’ October 7th offensive was the correct decision, and that figure held steady at roughly 71 per cent from March to June 2024 [see also: here].
More alarming still, a poll published in April 2024 found that over 90 per cent of Palestinians believe that Hamas committed no atrocities against Israeli civilians on Oct.7, 2023. Only one in five has seen videos of Hamas’ atrocities, and of those who have not, only one in five had access to the footage and chose not to watch; the rest said the media they followed did not show it. Those who watched the videos were almost ten times more likely to believe Hamas committed atrocities.
If polling indicates that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians deny that Hamas committed atrocities against civilians, and roughly 70 per cent regard the October 7th offensive the correct decision, on what basis did Sky News feature a Palestinian voice that offered no condemnation of Hamas in its remembrance of October 7? None of this is to say that Palestinian voices should be silenced. Rather, it is to ask why they were amplified so conspicuously at the expense of Jewish voices, when the war itself was precipitated by the massacre of Jews.
A reverse facial image search surfaced a video, dated 2011, featuring al-Qarra, directed by Dani Lagartofernández and produced by the International Catalan Institute for Peace (ICIP) (Image below).
In the 15-minute segment, al-Qarra alleges that “Israeli bulldozers have destroyed everything” [04:58]. Later, one of her sons, identified only as “Abdo,” laments Gaza’ socio-economic conditions and uses the plural noun “Yahud” in alleging that “the Jews have erased everything” and “there can never be peace” [13:10].
This is not a criticism of Israeli policy. It assigns collective blame to Jews, and it was readily discoverable before Sky News chose to platform al-Qarra.
Screen grab of Sabah al-Qarra from the ICIP’s video footage.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, al-Qarra also has an extensive history of eulogising “martyrs” on social media, including documented Hamas operatives Mahmoud Issa Aba Saada [see: here] and Yasser Murtaja [see: here], in addition to PIJ operative Hisham Abu Hawash [see: here]. Has Sky News become so desperate to platform Palestinian suffering that it has abandoned its vetting procedures altogether?
In a country that has seen rampant antisemitic attacks, historical and October 7th revisionism, British broadcasters have a duty not to use passive constructions that obfuscate responsibility. They also have a duty not to platform, without due diligence checks, those on the “Palestinian side” who openly support and eulogise the very terrorist groups who committed the October 7th atrocities. If Sky News obsessively coalesces around “the other side” narrative and offers Jewish voices no reprieve, must we conclude that it was never on the side of massacred Jews at all?