Amnesty International has been anything but a marginal source in BBC and New York Times coverage of the Gaza Strip. From October 2023 to October 2025, Amnesty International was among the top three most heavily cited organizations in reporting by the two mainstream media outlets on the Hamas-Israel conflict.
Yet these leading media outlets, which are otherwise highly attentive to NGO reports detailing Gaza Strip fatalities or crises, strikingly failed to note Amnesty’s new report on Hamas’s extrajudicial killings.
On Aug. 21, Amnesty International published an extensive report condemning Hamas’s extrajudicial executions in Gaza and called for justice for the victims. It documented nine cases in which Hamas-affiliated authorities and forces carried out extrajudicial executions and one unlawful killing, most of them in the immediate aftermath of the October 2025 ceasefire.
One particularly shocking case was the public execution of eight members of the Dughmush family from the Al-Sabra neighborhood of Gaza, accused of collaborating with Israel. Family members who attended the burial of the eight victims told Amnesty International that the victims’ bodies bore visible signs of torture.
The report also documented the killing of Hisham al-Saftawi, 57, in Al-Bureij Refugee camp in October 2025. Thirty masked men, who identified themselves as members of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, stormed al-Saftawi’s home and shot him in the back after he refused to comply with arrest orders.
The report cited a U.N. Commission of Inquiry finding 249 cases of extrajudicial executions and severe violence in Gaza between August 2024 and January 2026. At least 60 of them are attributable to Hamas-affiliated forces.
The total silence at the BBC and The New York Times on these killings is noteworthy given the two media outlets’ history of heavily relying upon Amnesty in their obsessive coverage of the humanitarian issues in the coastal enclave.
A single Amnesty statement on humanitarian conditions in Gaza routinely generates several articles within each outlet, which often reuses the identical quoted language across different pieces published days or weeks apart. When Amnesty International became the first human-rights organization to accuse Israel of genocide in December 2024, that single finding went on to anchor more than a dozen separate articles over the following nine months. Whenever Amnesty speaks about Israel, both outlets use their reports to create content for months or even years afterwards.
Across two years of coverage, the Times uncritically cited dozens of NGOs in Israel-related coverage hundreds of times. More than one-third of their Amnesty-specific citations were related to Israel, and some 65% of all NGO citations in its coverage of the period’s global conflicts concerned Israel’s conduct. Against that volume, the paper’s total lack of coverage on Amnesty’s newest report on Hamas crimes makes clear whose conduct is treated as newsworthy and whose is not.
The New York Times constantly returned, long after they were published, to several questionable Amnesty charges about Israeli misbehavior: its allegation that Israel illegally used white phosphorus in Lebanon; the accusation that Israel was operating “automated apartheid” through facial recognition technology; the controversial report on mass graves near Nasser Hospital in the southern part of the Gaza Strip; and its description of Israeli evacuation warnings as “inadequate.” Given the paper’s extensive use of Amnesty reports as they relate to Gaza, this newest report detailing Hamas’s killings is precisely the kind of information one would expect it to cover.
Yet in this two-year period, only two New York Times articles used an NGO finding to substantiate an accusation against Hamas. They cited a 2014 Amnesty report about how Hamas used Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City to “detain, interrogate, torture and otherwise ill-treat suspects,” pairing it with scrutiny over Israel’s bombing of the hospital.
Like the New York Times, the BBC’s use of Amnesty statements in its Israel coverage also took many forms. It extensively and uncritically covered Amnesty’s characterization of Greta Thunberg’s flotilla as “an indictment” of Israel’s blockade. It reported on Amnesty’s campaign to lobby FIFA and UEFA to suspend Israel from competing in international soccer tournaments. When the United Kingdom partially suspended arms sales to Israel in September 2024, the BBC quoted Amnesty calling the move “gesture politics” and “riddled with loopholes” across three separate articles in a single day.
Within this two-year period of BBC coverage, the only NGO citation that condemned Hamas was a Human Rights Watch report that stated Hamas and other groups committed war crimes on Oct. 7, 2023—published more than nine months after the massacre occurred.
Outlets like the Times and BBC treat Amnesty International reports as gospel to be detailed and amplified in hundreds of articles, legitimizing the gravest of accusations against Israel. Publishing follow-up articles on such reports about Gaza is the usual pattern in their coverage of the conflict.
And yet, neither outlet has touched this rare report condemning abuse by Hamas on Palestinian Arabs; it simply does not fit the story they have chosen to tell about this nearly three-year-old war.
