REVEALED: The Truth About Zakaria, The BBC’s Second Gaza Child Star

New footage shows the BBC’s ‘volunteer paramedic’ posing with Hamas terrorists, waving guns, and leading jihadist chants — none of which appeared in the Corporation’s heavily sanitised film

The BBC's long-awaited editorial review of its documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has finally been published. Far from offering a rigorous examination of its journalistic conduct, the report reads like a desperate institutional whitewash. It focuses primarily on the film’s main narrator, Abdullah Al-Yazouri, acknowledging a breach of BBC guidelines for failing to disclose that he is the son of a Hamas minister. But totallu overlooked in the report is the film’s other key child protagonist: Zakaria.

I can now reveal new and previously unseen footage and photographs of Zakaria that fundamentally change the way he should have been portrayed. These materials expose a wider reality the BBC chose to ignore — one that directly contradicts the documentary’s narrative of Palestinian children in Gaza leading regular, Western-style lives interrupted only by the disruption of Israeli military action.

Zakaria is presented in the film as a heroic child volunteer paramedic. He is portrayed as a brave and resourceful 11-year-old, volunteering to help amid the chaos of war. The film’s narrator, himself the son of a Hamas official, tells viewers: “Even if you’re still a child, you have to find a way to fit in. Zakaria is 11. He’s living on his own at the hospital. He’s a hustler.” Zakaria himself says, “I became a volunteer. You get to know journalists, get to know doctors, get to know paramedics.”

To any objective viewer, this is clearly a scene of make-believe: a child encouraged by adults to play-act in adult roles. As a paramedic, Zakaria is ineffective, often getting in the way. But the adults humour him. An ambulance driver gives him the task of filling a water bottle. Another adult asks how many “martyrs” he’s seen. Later, he is shown “helping” journalists reporting from the hospital.

I can now reveal that Zakaria is indeed regularly engaged in this kind of role-play, not just with ambulances and journalists, but also with terrorism and armed extremism. He has been repeatedly filmed and photographed in direct, affectionate contact with masked Hamas terrorists, holding weapons, waving guns, and leading pro-terrorist chants with other children. These images and videos have been circulated on social media accounts run by so-called ‘journalists’ in Gaza, and uncovered by ‘Gazawood’. These accounts are known for publishing staged or manipulated footage designed to appeal to Western audiences and media outlets. The BBC film explains none of this.

Glorification of violence

Like many Palestinian children, Zakaria is encouraged by the adults around him to glorify violence, religious war, guns, and terrorism.

In one video, Zakaria stands before five other children, seated and listening as he brandishes a gun (or replica gun). He instructs them to chant: “Allahu Akbar wa lillah al-hamd” (God is greatest and praise be to God)

Then continues:

“Listen up. Say this slogan:
‘Put the sword against the sword. We are the sons of Muhammad Deif, the Hamas emblem.’”

An adult filming him asks, “Who are you?”

Zakaria replies, “I am Abu Al-Zayek from the logistics services.”

Here he is play-acting not as a paramedic, but as a terrorist logistics leader.

A Hamas rally for Children

In another video, Zakaria grins as he holds what appears to be an assault rifle under the arm of a masked and uniformed militant. The setting appears to be a public rally near Gaza’s coast.

The militant is wearing full tactical gear, including camouflage clothing, a bulletproof vest, and a head covering, with a green headband and an insignia that appears to belong to the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas. Zakaria is positioned in the foreground, clearly comfortable and even cheerful, while gripping the weapon. The terrorist has a hand placed on the boy’s shoulder in a familiar or protective gesture, as if encouraging the interaction. In the background, a group of children and adults can be seen on a raised platform, some waving green flags commonly associated with Hamas. A young woman in a hijab is seen taking a selfie with the terrorists behind her, her friends watching on.

In the video we hear:

“100%, Abu Al-Zayek!” (Abu Al-Zayek is a nickname or a familiar way to refer to Zakaria in Arab culture)

The fighter says to him: “You’re 100%, Zika. What are you going to do?”

He replies, “I will kill him without mercy. Take a picture of me with the weapon. Take a picture of me.”

The man with him says, “You’re a beast, Ziko. You’re a beast.”

This image is a stark visual of the weaponisation of childhood. It illustrates not only the normalisation of armed militants in public Palestinian life but also the active involvement and even celebration of children in these environments. The smiling child holding a weapon next to an armed fighter sends a deeply troubling message about indoctrination and the collapsing boundary between childhood and militant, Islamic terrorist ideology. The cheerful tone of the video, juxtaposed with the presence of deadly weaponry, exposes the perverse way violence is romanticised or made to appear innocuous through the lens of propaganda. Did the BBC show any of this? No, they did not.

Training other children in extremism

In a third video, Zakaria is filmed waving a handgun from inside a car, surrounded by other children. The caption burnt into the video reads: “القائد. زيكو 😂💔” — “The leader. Ziko”

He chants:

“I hear the slogan: ‘Put the sword against the sword. We are the men of Muhammad Deif.’”

An adult asks, “Have you trained these?”

Zakaria replies, “Yes.”

Then someone says, “Mu’awiya.”

Zakaria corrects him: “It’s called ‘Ma’nawiya Ghaliya’” — a reference to Palestinian war songs.

This is not merely child play. It is a campaign of systemic indoctrination and glorification of jihad, carried out in clear view and embraced by mainstream Palestinian society. That the BBC chose to ignore all of this in a film about Palestinian childhoods in Gaza, while presenting Zakaria as a harmless, brave boy playing paramedic, is a journalistic failure of the highest order. Worse still, when people in the film speak of “Jews”, the BBC subtitles mistranslate the word to “Israelis”, masking the true target of this violent ideology which is so enthusiastically being passed on to the next generation.

Hidden in clear sight

This aren’t isolated incidents. There are photographs of Zakaria, or Ziko, showing him being actively indoctrinated into glorifying violence, as is normal for so many Palestinian children in Gaza.

Though a considerable amount of this material is publicly available, much of it documented by open-source investigators such as the account “Gazawood” (a name that references the staged, cinematic quality of much of the content emerging from the Gaza strip), the BBC made no attempt to show this side of Zakaria’s or the other children’s lives. This failure is not merely a missed opportunity, it is a serious editorial omission. The film misleads its audience by romanticising child role-play in humanitarian roles, while completely omitting their indoctrination into violent, extremist ones.

We can’t blame Zakaria. He’s a child. But we must blame the society that so casually teaches him and other children to hate, kill, and glorify terrorism. It is child abuse, aimed at creating ever more psychopathic killers to carry out more terror attacks, more suicide bombings, more 7th Octobers.

I will never forget the image of a child in the crowd gathering around the car carrying the dead and violated body of Shani Louk as her Palestinian murderers drove it into Gaza for a celebratory parade on 7th October 2024. The gathered crowd joyfully pushed to see the broken and naked body of the poor young woman who had merely tried to celebrate music and love at the Nova Festival. As the Palestinian adults celebrated around their trophy, one child in a red T-shirt leant in to spit on her broken remains. The sight of that child, so keen to defile a woman’s dead body, broke me inside. And yet I knew that child had not chosen this path for himself: this was the result of the mainstreaming of extremist Islamic ideas of war and of violent Palestinianism among the youngest in their society.

The BBC had an opportunity to explain all this. They could have shown how Palestinian society in Gaza regularly abuses its children, teaching them violence and murder. It could have shown what hell life is for them, under the guidance of adults who define their identity in terms of jihad, killing Jews, and Islamic extremism. But as usual it chose to hide all of that, to tell different story — a tidier, simpler, binary story of goodies and baddies. A make-believe story.

The world’s most powerful broadcaster chose to mislead its audience about the true nature of Palestinian childhood under Hamas rule. And that choice has consequences.