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07-01-2026
LONDON/ JERUSALEM: The BBC has said it has reached a settlement with a Jewish family who survived Hamas’s 7 October attacks in southern Israel after a news crew filmed inside their destroyed home.
The reporting team, which included senior correspondent Jeremy Bowen, entered the Horenstein family’s home in the days after the attacks in 2023.
A BBC spokesperson said on Friday: “While we do not generally comment on specific legal issues we are pleased to have reached an agreement in this case.”
Tzeela and Simon Horenstein and their two young children survived the attack when a door the Hamas militants tried to blast open twisted and jammed.
At the time the news crew filmed in their wrecked home many of the family’s friends and relatives did not know if they were alive.
Tzeela Horenstein told the Jewish News that not only had the militants tried to break into their home and murder them “but then the BBC crew entered again, this time with a camera as a weapon, without permission or consent”.
This second “intrusion” had left the family feeling as if “everything that was still under our control had been taken from us”, she added.
The BBC had reportedly agreed to pay the family £28,000, according to the Jewish News.
The US president, Donald Trump, has filed a defamation lawsuit against the BBC seeking $10bn in damages over the way it edited his 2021 speech before a mob of his supporters attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
The BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, announced his resignation in November over the edit.
In October, the UK’s media regulator Ofcom also ruled against the BBC over a documentary that featured narration by a boy who was later revealed to be the son of a Hamas official. The broadcaster had failed to disclose that link.
Ofcom said the omission constituted “a significant source of deception”, further fueling accusations of editorial bias.
Hamas’s deadly 7 October attacks on southern Israel sparked a devastating war in Gaza.
A fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has been in place since 10 October.
In November 2025, the BBC director general, Tim Davie, and head of news, Deborah Turness, resigned dramatically after accusations that the corporation was failing in its duty of impartiality. The chair of the board, Samir Shah, is expected to apologies for the way in which a speech by the US president, Donald Trump, was edited in an episode of Panorama. The show is one of a number of examples highlighted by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee, who detailed his concerns about the broadcaster’s impartiality in a memo published by the Telegraph.
Earlier, a BBC documentary about children in Gaza breached the corporation’s editorial guidelines for accuracy by failing to disclose its child narrator was the son of a Hamas official, an internal review has found.
However, the inquiry into the making of Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone found no other breaches of guidelines in its production, including impartiality. It found that no outside interests “inappropriately impacted on the program”.
“Careful consideration of the requirements of due impartiality was undertaken in this project given the highly contested nature of the subject matter,” the report found.
Peter Johnston, the BBC’s director of editorial complaints and reviews, undertook the review after the documentary was pulled from the iPlayer following the claims against it. The program was made for the BBC by the independent production company Hoyo Films. (Int’l News Desk)
