‘FREE free Palestine! BBC shame on you, your hands are bloody too!’ chanted 100 protesters outside the BBC in central London yesterday.
The vigil marked the anniversary of the assassination of Anas Al Sharif and his colleagues in the journalists’ tent in Gaza on 10 August 2025.
He was one of 349 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists assassinated during the current genocide. Protesters carried Palestinian and Irish flags, placards and pictures of slain journalists, alongside a 25-yard banner reading ‘BBC you are complicit’.
West London teacher Jacky Browne told News Line: ‘There must be a general strike to stop Britain arming Israel. Every single one of us should take action.
‘The BBC are completely involved in Israeli propaganda. I felt it was really important to come today. The leader of my union, the National Education Union, has spoken out against the genocide. Now is the time for action, there must be a campaign for a general strike to stop Britain arming Israel.’
Organiser Serena said: ‘It’s the anniversary of yet another Palestinian journalist being murdered, Anas Al Sharif. I was here a year ago, the day after he died. He was in a journalists’ tent in Gaza that was targeted by the Israeli Occupational Force. The whole team died.
‘The BBC is absolutely complicit in the genocide. It has played down the deliberate targeting of children, they don’t report on the doctors that are being targeted, the endless war crimes.’
Pat Reynolds, of the Irish Brigade and Irish for Palestine, said: ‘We are the main group supporting Palestine amongst the Irish in Britain. We played a role in the hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in British jails recently.
‘Incidentally, I attended the founding conference of the Workers Revolutionary Party in Hammersmith in 1973. It was a massive event.
‘My focus has always been the Irish struggle. The reason the Irish identify so strongly with Palestine is because it’s an anti-occupation, anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle and it is the front line in the fight against US imperialism.’
Teacher Mary Ross said: ‘The BBC are still not reporting what is going on in Gaza and the Occupied Territories and in Lebanon. 322 Palestinian and 27 Lebanese press workers have been murdered by Israel for trying to report the truth.
‘Why isn’t the BBC reporting this and why do they still fail to report the Israeli use of the Hannibal Doctrine, which is to kill their own people rather than let them be captured.
And there’s the Dahiya Doctrine, under which the Israeli military use massive disproportionate force and deliberately target civilians and civilian infrastructure.’
Gaz, another teacher, said: ‘We need a general strike to stop Britain arming Israel, which is supporting genocide, which is supporting war crime. One day the BBC will be remembered and spoken of in the same way as the Gestapo and Hitler’s propaganda machine.’