The leader of Israel's Yesh Atid party, Yair Lapid, scolded the BBC and other UK media outlets for what he described as their attempts to "justify" Arab stabbing and other terrorist attacks against Israeli Jews.

Appearing on BBC's HARDtalk Wednesday, Lapid said that the current wave of Palestinian terrorism felt "more religious" than previous ones.

"This is about Islam and Jews, this is not a national dispute or conflict," Lapid said.

"These are Islamic assassins who want to kill Jews because they are Jews," he added to presenter Stephen Sackur.

The opposition MK further noted how most attackers were inspired by a toxic mixture of extremist religious preachers in mosque and violent incitement on social media.

When Sackur objected to his explanation, Lapid noted that even "the stabbers" and inciters themselves were phrasing it as a religious war of annihilation against "the Jews," and accused Sackur of providing a "justification" for such attacks.

When the presenter denied the accusation, saying he was simply trying to provide "context" to the violence, Lapid asked whether he would act similarly if terrorists targeted Londoners in the same way.

"If there was a Muslim madman running through the streets of London trying to stab a British policeman... in the throat - cut his throat with the knife - and the policeman would shoot and kill him, would you say, 'well you have to understand the difficult kind of living immigrants have in this country?'

"Or would you say 'No, he's a madman and we should kill him because this is no way to behave in a civilized country?"

The BBC and other media outlets have been accused of playing down Israeli victims of terror, with both misleading headlines and by making an equivalence between Jewish victims and Arab attackers when recounting casualties.

Most recently, the BBC's own former chairman harshly criticized the corporation for its "inexcusable" anti-Israel bias.