'Outrageous and preposterous' – Israeli President Herzog slams BBC for false equivalence between terror prisoners and hostages

While UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the “appalling” treatment by Hamas of Israeli hostage Eli Sharabi, Israeli President Isaac Herzog was forced to reprimand the BBC for its regularly drawn moral equivalence between terrorism and the actions of the Jewish state.

On the BBC’s Sunday morning news show, the host, Laura Kuenssberg, paid lip service to the emaciated hostages released on Saturday, then immediately challenged Herzog about alleged human rights abuses in Israeli jails, and during the war started by Hamas in Gaza.

“I absolutely reject that, and I think that this equality that the BBC is always trying to make is outrageous and preposterous, absolutely not true,” Herzog replied. 

“We are a democracy. We abide by the rule of law. All prisoners in Israel get whatever is necessary as prisoners under the law, under the supervision of the court, even a Supreme Court justice recently visited the prisons".

“And not only that, some of the prisoners, the Palestinians, didn’t want to leave. They didn’t want to go back to Gaza. They preferred staying in the Israeli prisons,” he added.

Herzog called on the BBC to stop the “outrageous” attitude of false equivalence, and to “understand that this attack on October 7 was an attack on the entire free world, and what we are doing when we are catching terrorists who carried out these atrocities, we are simply preventing them from taking on further attacks against humanity at large.”

“I shared the relief of so many at Eli Sharabi’s release earlier today but was dismayed to see his frail condition and the circumstances of his release,” Starmer said in an official statement. “Having met his relatives I appreciate the deep pain they have endured and my thoughts are with them.”

Sharabi’s wife, Lianne, born in Bristol, UK, was murdered alongside her two daughters, Noiya (16) and Yahel (13), on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists stormed Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel. During Sharabi’s staged release on Saturday, the broken man was forced to thank his captors and to say how much he was looking forward to seeing his wife and children.

“We must continue to see all the hostages freed – these people were ripped away from their lives in the most brutal circumstances and held in appalling conditions,” the British premier added.

Also on Sunday, BBC Breakfast spoke with the British in-laws of Sharabi, Gill and Pete Brisley, who were very shaken to see his gaunt and traumatized appearance, on top of the loss of their daughter and granddaughters, 16 months ago.

“They are inhuman these… can’t call them people, they’re monsters who have done that to him,” said Mr Brisley, as the reporter showed him the newly released photograph of Sharabi being comforted by his mother and sister, his only surviving relatives.

Honest Reporting has criticized the reporting of the hostage releases since the Hamas-Israel ceasefire took effect last month. This weekend, the watchdog highlighted what it felt were the newsgroups with the worst record: the BBC, CNN and The Guardian newspaper.

“Concerns over [the] appearance of hostages on both sides,” Honest Reporting challenged the BBC in a post on 𝕏. “There are no ‘both sides’ here. What a disgusting false moral equivalence between actual Israeli hostages held by Hamas & Palestinian prisoners jailed for terror offenses.”

It is not the first time the Israeli president has called out the public-funded British broadcaster. In the aftermath of the Hamas massacre, Herzog spoke to then UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, about the failure of the BBC to describe Hamas murderers as “terrorists.”

“We feel that… the way the BBC characterizes Hamas is a distortion of the facts,” Herzog told Sunak during his October 2023 solidarity visit to Jerusalem following the unprecedented attacks.

“There has to be an outcry so that there will be a correction and Hamas will be defined as a terror organization. What else do they need to see to understand that this is an atrocious terror organization?” he asked. 

After Hamas released a propaganda video of British-Israeli hostage, Nadav Popplewell, in May 2024, then-British Foreign Secretary David Cameron also challenged the BBC on its non-use of the 'terrorist' designation in relation to Hamas.

Since then, reporters at the corporation continue to parrot the line that the Iranian proxy group in Gaza is “designated a terrorist organization by many countries, including the UK.”