Lineker rejected the idea that impartiality meant being somehow neutral about “the mass murder of thousands of children”, which, he said, “is probably something that we should have a little opinion on”.

Rajan countered – the BBC needed to be “impartial”, and Lineker fired back that it needed to be “factual”.

Indeed, Rajan was stumped when Lineker said the BBC “wasn’t impartial about Russia and Ukraine.” Russia did indeed launch a brutal war of aggression against Ukraine, and the BBC has gone to no meaningful lengths to hide its institutional view on that.

Gary Lineker, "What's going on there (Gaza), the mass murder of thousands of children is something we should have an opinion on"

Amol Rajan, "The BBC needs to be impartial about it"

Gary Linekar, "Why? It needs to be factual"

Amol Rajan, "It needs to be impartial about… pic.twitter.com/LFUuvpvyCe

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) April 22, 2025

Lineker inserted a quote about journalism which – in full – reads: “If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”

This really gets to the heart of the disaster which is BBC journalism on Israel’s genocide. Over and over again, the BBC treats Israeli claims as credible, often framing entire news stories around their denials and deflections.

A striking example is the recent Israeli massacre of 15 Red Crescent medics and first responders, all of them unarmed, all of them systematically executed then disposed of in mass graves.

Israel’s authorities claimed that their ambulances had no emergency lights showing, which footage retrieved from the phone of a murdered medic showed was false. They claimed the ambulances were operating in an area classed as a conflict zone, requiring coordination: false.

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The Israeli military had even crushed their victims’ vehicles and tried to bury them: they later claimed this had happened by accident as they were moved off the road – also proved to be false.

There were multiple other claims –like the slaughtered being Hamas members – with not a scrap of evidence to support them.

All of these claims collapsed because of a combination of video footage, recorded emergency calls, survivor testimonies, and satellite imagery. But the BBC should have known that the Israeli state were likely lying, not just because of the absurdity of their claims, but because over and over again Israel’s statements about their atrocities have been proven to be falsehoods and distortions.

But the BBC continued to churn out Israeli claims as if they were credible. One BBC report ran the following line: “The soldiers buried the bodies of the 15 dead workers in sand to protect them from wild animals, the official said, claiming the vehicles were moved and buried the following day to clear the road.”

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This is clearly an unhinged lie, and yet it was published as though it was credible. Offering this sort of deference is not something the BBC would offer to Russian claims – especially as outlandish as this – and rightly so.

A particularly revealing moment came when Rajan said: “The Israeli position is that what’s happening in Gaza is a response to the slaughter and capture of innocent Israelis on October 7, and that full context needs to be there.”

Lineker rightly shot back: “But that’s not the full context, is it? Because the full context starts way before October 7, doesn’t it?”

Rajan would never have said: “Hamas would argue that what happened on October 7 is a response to the slaughter and capture of innocent Palestinians”, emphasising that context needed to be there. That’s despite the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians before October 7, many of them women and children, and indeed the capture of Palestinians, including those put through sham kangaroo trials or seized at the dead of night from family homes with no charge or trial – again, children among them.

That’s because Rajan would surely believe the atrocities of October 7 were too extreme for that context to be appropriate.

Amol Rajan has become a favoured host and interviewer for the BBC(Image: PA) That indefensible war crimes were committed against Israeli civilians on October 7 is beyond doubt. It is also a fact that far more extreme war crimes have been committed against Palestinians since.

Potentially hundreds of thousands slaughtered; the indiscriminate destruction of civilian infrastructure, like homes, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, libraries and churches; deliberate starvation; torture; forced disappearance; rape – we could go on.

And yet somehow one narrative is necessary context, while the other would be regarded as grotesque apologism for indefensible crimes.

In a recent article for Haaretz, two Israeli historians, Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, listed the horrors of Gaza and concluded: “This is precisely what genocide looks like.”

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It should be noted that there has been an endless supply of genocidal statements by Israeli leaders and officials, yet the BBC has failed to report many of them, let alone frame its coverage around them.

That’s the absurdity: absurd Israeli denials of atrocities are constantly regurgitated by the BBC as though they are credible, while statements of explicit criminal intent are buried or ignored.

And running like a thread through BBC coverage is the basic sense that Palestinian life is worth only the tiniest fraction of Israeli life.

Lineker has been a rare public voice speaking out when so many others have been cowards, a terrible sin during a genocide facilitated by your government.

He has exposed BBC coverage for what it is, and when the reckoning comes, this public service broadcaster will have very searching questions to answer indeed.