BBC Radio 4’s Today presenter Emma Barnett calls terrorist kidnappers ‘men working for Hamas’

BBC Radio 4’s Emma Barnett has called armed terrorists who kidnapped an elderly woman on October 7 “men working for Hamas”.

The Today programme host failed to call Hamas a terrorist organisation during the broadcast.

It is the latest in a series of incidents in which the BBC has failed to describe the group as terrorists.

Barnett was introducing a section of Today about a 75-year-old grandmother of nine who was kidnapped by Hamas at gunpoint.

She said: “On October 7 last year Ada Sagi was having a morning coffee at home in Nir Oz kibbutz on the border with Gaza, when suddenly several men armed with Kalashnikovs working for Hamas burst into her home and forced her at gunpoint onto a motorbike and took her hostage.”

Barnett went on to say a total of 116 hostages seized by Hamas that day remain unaccounted for.

Ada Sagi spent 53 days imprisoned by the group before she was released.

Ms Sagi described the men who kidnapped her as “two Hamas terrorists”, and added: “I saw people running away and many, many terrorists shooting them.”

The Campaign Against Antisemitism said the BBC’s decision not to call Hamas terrorists was “unfathomable” and that it “only fuels anti-Jewish extremists and apologists for terrorism”.

A spokesman told The Telegraph: “Ofcom has made it crystal clear that there is no rule stopping the BBC from referring to Hamas as terrorists, so what is the Corporation waiting for?”

Later on in the programme, when the full interview aired, Ms Barnett again described members of the terrorist group as “men working for Hamas”.

She said: “Several men working for Hamas burst into her home and forced her barefoot at gunpoint onto a motorbike and took her hostage alongside scores of others.”

The 39-year-old former Woman’s Hour presenter did not mention that Hamas is a proscribed terrorist group by the UK Government.

Ms Sagi said the group claimed they “were not Hamas” but members of “Jihad” who were taking her hostage so she could be exchanged for those being kept by Israel.

The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine is an Islamist paramilitary organisation seeking to establish a Palestinian state.

Lord Cameron has previously urged the BBC to call Hamas “terrorists”. In May, the Foreign Secretary said the organisation ought to “ask itself again” about how it labelled Hamas following the October 7 attack on Israel in which more than 1,100 people died.

He was speaking on BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, after Hamas released a video showing Nadav Popplewell, a British-Israeli hostage, who the group claimed had died in Gaza after being wounded in an Israeli air strike a month ago.

However a day later the BBC’s Nick Robinson ignored the demand while taking part in a discussion on Radio 4’s Today programme about Israel’s military operations in southern Gaza.

“Is there a sense that Benjamin Netanyahu is walking a political tightrope, proceeding with military action against what he says are the remaining targets of the group he calls terrorists, Hamas?” he asked Jo Floto, the BBC’s Middle East bureau editor.

Robinson’s wording was criticised by Sir Michael Fabricant, the Tory MP, who said on social media: “Why does Nick Robinson say on BBC Radio 4 ‘Hamas, a terrorist organisation as Israel would say’ when Hamas is a terrorist organisation and is proscribed as such by the United Kingdom and EU?”

Deborah Turness, the BBC’s head of news, has previously defended not describing Hamas as terrorists and the broadcaster has not changed its policy on the matter.

John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, previously said: “We don’t take sides. We don’t use loaded words like ‘evil’ or ‘cowardly’. We don’t talk about ‘terrorists’”.

The BBC was contacted for comment.