Gary Lineker appears to be calling the October 7 attacks “the Hamas thing.”

The CAA has also claimed that the presenter breached the BBC’s impartiality guidelines. The podcast on which he made the comments is unrelated to the BBC and is produced by Mr Lineker’s own company Goalhanger Podcasts.

“Rather than being silenced, Mr Lineker’s attitude has become so normalized – and the voice of the mob to which he belongs has become so loud – that the BBC has become desensitized to it and regularly ignores the clear breaches of its impartiality guidelines. “Represent interventions,” said the CAA spokesman.

The BBC has been contacted for comment.

It is not the first time that Lineker has been embroiled in an impartiality dispute.

The moderator criticized government policy

He was criticized by Conservative MPs after describing government policies as “not dissimilar to those of Germany in the 1930s” in March 2023.

He has also backed a campaign calling for the scrapping of the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

In January, Jewish BBC staff lodged formal complaints about Lineker’s use of social media after he shared and then deleted a message calling for Israel to be banned from international football tournaments.

It is understood Lineker believed he was spreading the news of such a ban rather than calling for it, and deleted the post.

A few months earlier, Lineker also shared a video of a discussion between journalist Owen Jones and Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust studies at Stockton University, in which the scholar argued that Israel was involved in “genocidal killings.”

In the podcast, the presenter described the situation in Gaza as “the worst thing I have seen in my life.”

“I’m not a Muslim. I’m not a Jew. I’m not an Israeli. I’m not a Palestinian. “So I think you look at it purely from the outside as a neutral perspective,” he said.

“There’s a lot of lobbying going on to keep people quiet, so I understand why most people stay away from it, but I’m making some progress now. I’m pretty sure and can’t keep quiet about what’s happening. It’s so terrible.”