its website of an IDF operation that stated, "The Israeli air force said it was targeting a rocket firing team.... UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned Israel's attacks on Palestinian civilians, calling them inappropriate and disproportionate", it should have made reference to what Ban Ki-Moon said about Palestinian rocket attacks as well as to the excessive use of force by Israel. The article was also amended to remove the reference of Israeli 'attacks on civilians' as Ban's attributed comments were made weeks earlier to the UN Security Council and not in reference to that particular attack. In fact, he had never used such terminology. The BBC received intense criticism in January 2009 for its decision not to broadcast a television appeal by aid agencies on behalf of the people of Gaza during the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, on the grounds that it could compromise the BBC's journalistic impartiality. A number of protesters asserted that it showed pro-Israeli bias, and some analysts suggested that the BBC's decision in the matter derived from its concern to avoid anti-Israeli bias, as analysed in the Balen Report. Parties criticising the decision, included Church of England archbishops, British government ministers and even some BBC employees. More than 11,000 complaints were filed in a three-day span. The BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, explained that the BBC had a duty to cover the Gaza dispute in a "balanced, objective way" and was concerned about endorsing something that could "suggest the backing one side". Politicians such as Tony Benn broke the BBC's ban on the appeal and broadcast the Gaza appeal on BBC News: "If the BBC won't broadcast the appeal, then I'm going to do it myself". He added that "no one [working for the broadcaster] agrees with what the BBC has done". When Peter Oborne and James Jones investigated the BBC's refusal to screen the appeal, they said they found it "almost impossible to get anyone to come on the record". They were told by organisations Disasters Emergency Committee, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children Fund and the Catholic agency CAFOD that the topic was "too sensitive". Mohamed El-Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, protested the BBC's decision by cancelling interviews scheduled with the company; El-Baradei claimed the refusal to air the aid appeal "violates the rules of basic human decency which are there to help vulnerable people irrespective of who is