The BBC appears to be deciding the level of responsibility a child bears for their own actions based not on age, but on ethnicity. When we look at comparable reporting on allegations against Palestinian children, British children and Israeli children, a disturbing pattern emerges around who is responsible, who has agency, who is sympathetic, and who is humanised. The BBC has a royal charter duty to impartiality and specific rules around the protection of under 18’s. It is indefensible for a publicly funded British institution to ascribe childhood based on anything other than age.
On 7th September Lucy Williamson published a story on the BBC website titled Palestinian parents fear for children’s lives at school as settler attacks grow which she repeated on the BBC News Now programme of the 8th, the News Day programme of the 8th, and at least 15 BBC News bulletins on the BBC News Channel and BBC 1 across the two days.
The main argument of the story is that Israelis, particularly settlers, are singling out and killing Palestinian children. The article opens with the story of one specific child:
“14-year-old Aws al-Naasan, was shot dead by a settler outside the school gates in April.”
And only several paragraphs later, after a graphic description of his injuries and emotive language around his loss notes:
“The Israeli military said in a statement at the time that stones had been hurled at a car carrying “civilians including a reservist soldier”, and that the reservist had got out of the vehicle and fired at suspects.”
In a video from the 28th August Williamson talks about another boy shot dead:
“17 yr old Kareem was shot dead in his village near Hebron by a settlement security guard who was walking with a group of Jewish settlers past his house. Israel’s army said it had received reports of Palestinians throwing stones.”
In a report titled ‘Israeli settlers laid siege to our home’: Inside a Palestinian village under weekly attack from 29th July Williamson tells us:
“The IDF told us its forces had been in al-Mughayyir that day, responding to reports of a confrontation between Palestinians and Israeli civilians.
It said soldiers had entered a house in the village to search for suspects throwing stones, and separately, that they had detained one person taking part in what it called a “violent riot”.
It said it was investigating allegations of violence by soldiers.
It also said masked Palestinians had used slings to hurl stones at soldiers, that its forces fired to remove the threat, and that “a hit was identified”, meaning someone was shot.”
And then, separated by no less than 49 paragraphs, gives us the tragic story of a young footballer who died of injuries sustained in the confrontation:
“One week after the attack in al-Mughayyir, Palestinian residents were still paying the price.
Seventeen-year-old Fadi Hamdallah al-Nassan, shot in the leg that day, had died of his injuries.
A football player with the Palestinian national youth team, he was carried back through the village streets for burial.”
The construction of these stories shows us that the BBC does not consider teenage boys allegedly throwing stones to be engaged in any sort of dangerous or criminal behaviour, and certainly not violence. The tone is one of sympathy, tragedy and loss of innocent children.
How then, does the BBC describe British children allegedly engaged in potentially deadly stone throwing?
On the 7th April 2026 there appeared on the BBC website a very short and to the point article titled Teens arrested after bricks thrown from M1 bridge:
“The teenagers had since been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage with intent to endanger life and were taken into custody.”
On 11th April 2023 they published “Teen arrested over brick assault on two PCSOs in unmarked car” which tells us:
“A 15-year-old male had since been arrested on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker and he remained in police custody, the force said.
Supt Richard Padwell said: “Assaults on emergency workers are completely unacceptable and we will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.
“These PCSOs were going about their daily duties and they should not come under attack like this.”
And on the 24th June 2025:
“A teenager has been left with life-threatening facial and head injuries after a brick was believed to have been thrown into a moving car… A 17-year-old boy, from High Wycombe, was arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm with intent and released on bail until 10 September.”
So, the BBC is clearly capable of identifying and describing dangerous criminal stone throwing in British boys. They are deemed sufficiently culpable for words like “attack” “assault” and “intent to endager life” despite them being minors. Why is it then, that Palestinian boys do not merit the same labelling?
Perhaps, this discrepancy could be explained by the dire consequences to some Palestinian boys for engaging in criminal and life-threatening stone throwing. As well as the prison risk they share with their British counterparts it is absolutely true that the IDF has changed its policy on live fire response to stone throwing since October 7th and that engaging in this behaviour can result in being shot. Life in a war zone is, after all, materially different to life in High Wycombe.
How then, does the BBC deal with Israeli teen boys, also living in a war zone, also facing the potential for extreme violence, allegedly engaged in the same behaviour? For the most part, they ignore them entirely, subsuming them into the collective “settlers”, their minority being no excuse for their Jewishness.
In the video How Israeli settlers are besieging Palestinian family homes in West Bank from 12th August images appear to show very young men and teenagers that the BBC says are:
“settlers swarming”
But we cannot verify their ages because the BBC simply doesn’t tell us.
In the video “Inside a Palestinian village under weekly Israeli settler attacks” from 29th July Lucy Williamson’s dramatic and ominous voiceover tells us:
“settlers have entered the village”
Over images of obviously young teenage boys. Once again, their age is not considered pertinent to the story.
Towards the end of the 7th September article Williamson acknowledges:
“Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has attributed settler violence to a tiny extremist minority, describing them in a recent television interview as “150 juvenile delinquents”.”
But the quote from Netanyahu is entirely separate from any reporting on actual minors and therefore seems to be framed as untrustworthy minimising rather than a genuine characterisation of any real issues on the ground.
One Williamson article from July does mention Israeli teenagers:
“The settlers smashing the Abu Alia gate that Saturday in al-Mughayyir seemed to be mainly teenagers, but earlier that day, a settler group had put out a call on social media to “expel the enemy”, including a quote from the Torah. “If you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, those you leave will become spikes in your eyes and thorns in your sides,” it says.”
The word “but” here seeming to explicitly negate this fact. But, Williamson seems to say, they aren’t really children, they’re really just violent Jews. The rest of her reporting on the subject provides considerably more questions than answers.
In fact, the BBC has shown a remarkable lack of journalistic interest in the Hilltop Youth. This is a long-standing issue, well reported on inside Israel, so where is the coverage on these children, their backgrounds, their needs, their families or the efforts of the state to engage with them?
A search of the BBC news website for ‘hilltop youth’ returns one relevant result from 2009:
Hilltop Youth push to settle West Bank
And a search of the BBC index which contains 11,906,654 pieces of programming returns precisely zero.
At a time when the BBC is covering settler violence almost daily at a massive volume, producing hundreds upon hundreds of individual pieces of content, it is fascinating that nobody seems to want to look at the Israeli children caught up in this conflict. A blind spot this large seems too obvious to be unintentional.
The BBC is impartial by its charter and its mission. It does not have the right to make judgement calls on the moral value of children’s lives, neither does it have the right to construct or strip away childhood based on race or ethnicity.
Whether British, Palestinian or Israeli, the BBC should report on the criminality and victimhood of minors exactly the same way.