Even by the admittedly lax CBC News standards when it comes to covering the Middle East over the last 17 months, what appeared during the 10pm newscast on February 23 was particularly egregious.
As host Ian Hanomansing spoke during The National evening news program, the news ticker at the bottom of the screen blared out for viewers the following: Israel suspends release of more than 600 Palestinian hostages.
With those nine words, broadcast to an audience across the country, CBC News had made a mockery of journalistic integrity and factual accuracy.
The ticker referred to “Palestinian hostages” being held by Israel, though there are no Palestinian hostages being held by Jerusalem. What CBC News was referring to was the 600 Palestinian security prisoners, many of them convicted terrorists and murderers with blood on their hands, whose release was part of a first-phase agreement between Israel and Hamas.
Under the agreement, Israel would release thousands of Palestinian security prisoners. Among the Palestinians whom CBC News evidently considers to be “hostages” included Zakaria Zubeidi, a former terrorist leader in the Arab city of Jenin, tied to a bus bombing which murdered six people in Israel in 2002, Mahmoud Atallah, who murdered a Palestinian woman he considered a collaborator with Israel, and for raping an Israeli female prison guard, and Khalil Jabarin, who stabbed a young Israeli man to death in 2018.
In exchange, Hamas would release 33 hostages, alive or dead, who were violently kidnapped by Gazans on October 7, 2023.
But when Hamas released these Israeli and foreign hostages kidnapped nearly 17 months ago, they did so in a grotesque and dehumanizing public spectacle, forcing hostages to kiss their kidnappers, receive a gift bag from terrorists, and stand on a stage among a jeering crowd of Gazans. The freed hostages were emaciated, and reported experiencing indescribable torture and abuse while being held by Hamas.
But what happened on February 22 was perhaps the worst of all. That day, Hamas laid out four black caskets of murdered hostages on a Gaza stage, under the backdrop of a propaganda poster featuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Dracula: the bodies of 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz, along with Ariel and Kfir Bibas, who were four years old and nine months old when they were kidnapped alongside their parents Shiri and Yarden, on October 7, 2023.
Appallingly, the casket featuring Shiri’s face did not actually hold her remains, but that of an unidentified woman whom Hamas tried to pass off as hers, though days later, it eventually presented the right body to Israel.
Yarden, the father, was released alive in an exchange on February 1, 2025, while Shiri and her sons, it was later revealed, were brutally murdered by their captors just days after being kidnapped. The Bibas family became symbols of the Israeli hostages, as well as the moral depravity of terrorists in Gaza.
On the stage where their caskets were paraded in front of a jeering audience in Gaza, each box featured a photo of the murdered, along with the caption “Date of arrest, October 7, 2023,” calling the kidnapping of a family, including two young children, an “arrest.”
Repulsed by this inhumane circus, Israel announced that it would refuse to release the next batch of 600 Palestinian prisoners, terrorists and murderers unless Hamas stops the humiliating and macabre ceremonies in subsequent exchanges.
Upon seeing the CBC’s egregious error and bold falsehood, HonestReporting Canada filed a complaint immediately with CBC News who three days later responded by thanking HRC for drawing this matter to their attention, however, to date we have yet to see any corrective action undertaken by the CBC, in what is yet another failure of journalistic accountability.
For our public broadcaster, the Palestinian terrorists who murdered, raped and massacred Israeli civilians are “hostages,” apparently in no different a category than their victims. With this latest scandalous ticker, CBC News’ anti-Israel bias continues to reach new depths, and an independent commission to review the publicly-funded broadcaster is urgently needed.
