'BBC bosses pulled our film on Israel attacking Gaza's medics. Here's why'

The inside story of how the corporation repeatedly delayed and ultimately shelved a damning documentary is revealed by producer Ben de Pear and its narrator Ramita Navai

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"Ramita, oh, how brilliant that you're here." The senior BBC executives could not mask their surprise that Ramita Navai, the reporter of the film they had commissioned on the destruction of Gaza's health service, had turned up to a meeting they had not invited her to.

They had not invited her because, as it turned out, the point of the meeting was to set her up as the fall guy.

It was early May. We were executive producers of a documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, directed by Karim Shah. On the agenda for the meeting at new Broadcasting House was the BBC's decision to pull the film for the final time, days before its scheduled broadcast.

This was the sixth time the BBC had stopped the release of our film, a yearlong investigation into Israel's targeting of Palestinian doctors and the healthcare system in Gaza.

The film had been completed, delivered, approved by lawyers and editors, and praised by the bosses, but then its release began to be repeatedly delayed.

The reasons given for the delays we faced in fact had little to do with our film and more to do with another one: How to Survive a Warzone. An internal investigation had been launched after it emerged that the child who narrated the film was the son of a junior Hamas minister in Gaza.

Now the BBC was anxious because it had another Gaza film on its hands: one showing that doctors, medics and hospitals were being targeted and killed by Israel, made by a production company working hand in glove with two of its own journalists.

Our film had been, in effect, shelved, but after two months of "inadvertently leading us on" (their words), one of the executives in this May meeting laid out a plan for a possible solution: to downgrade Ramita's role as correspondent to that of a "contributor" or "third party reporter".