The ABC has been subject to a series of targeted campaigns of complaints over the Middle East war, the woman in charge of investigating its coverage says.
The national broadcaster is pushing back on the anti-Semitism envoy's claims it disproportionately favours anti-Jewish voices in its reporting on the conflict.
ABC Ombudsman Fiona Cameron said the organisation was at times too slow to own up to its mistakes, but warned against drawing conclusions from the number of complaints.
"What we've seen ... is a definite trend towards campaign complaints that are arguing that the coverage of the Israel Middle East conflict is pro-Palestine," Ms Cameron told the anti-Semitism royal commission on Thursday.
"This comes, if not daily, weekly."
Ms Cameron said she wasn't sure what such campaigns were supposed to achieve as she assessed each complaint on its merits.
From October 2023 to May 2026 the ombudsman's office finalised 19,000 complaints, Ms Cameron said.
The ABC's editorial director Gavin Fang conceded the organisation's reporting in 2025 of claims about thousands of babies facing imminent death in Gaza was a "bad mistake", after anti-Semitism envoy Jillian Segal took the broadcaster to task over its coverage.
There was a strongly held perception in the Jewish community the ABC unreasonably focused on the war in the Middle East and presented biased and inaccurate reporting about the conflict, Ms Segal said.
But Mr Fang disagreed, arguing the ABC aimed to meet its editorial standards, which required news to be presented fairly and accurately.
"We seek to, where relevant, hear from affected parties on a variety of sides of the conflict," he told the inquiry.
"That means hearing from both Palestinians and from Israelis ... hearing from government sources and from non-government."
Mr Fang was pressed on a story reported by the ABC in May 2025 that included comments from a United Nations official suggesting 14,000 babies in Gaza could die in the next 48 hours without urgent aid.
The figure was later found to be inaccurate and Mr Fang said the broadcaster's decision to broadcast a correction on TV later in the afternoon but not publish a more general one until more than a week later was inadequate.
"It was a bad mistake," he said, but argued the organisation took time to ensure the error hadn't been replicated elsewhere.
Ms Cameron found the incident breached the broadcaster's editorial standards in part because the correction was not issued quickly enough.
"I would say that at times the ABC is slow ... to correct and clarify," she said.
Ms Segal said a separate oversight committee should be established to ensure the broadcaster followed its rules, arguing the ombudsman was not sufficiently independent.
"They are, with respect, judge, counsel and jury. They are all of it," she said.
But Mr Fang said another oversight body was not needed and it wasn't clear how it would interact with the ombudsman.
A group of protesters holding Palestinian flags and calling for sanctions on Israel stood outside the royal commission and were closely monitored by police.
Demonstrators held signs describing the inquiry as a "farce" and condemning what they described as Israel's "genocide" in Gaza.
In a statement before the hearing, the ABC said while most complaints over its coverage of the war in Gaza alleged bias, the criticism came from all sides.
"In the six months July-December 2025, 51 per cent of complaints claimed the ABC’s Israel-Gaza coverage was broadly pro-Palestinian and 47 per cent claimed it was broadly pro-Israel."
But Ms Segal did not accept an equal number of complaints meant the story was covered correctly.
