Amongst a barrage of anti-Israel opinion columns in The Globe and Mail recently, many which baselessly spread the “genocide” slur, a recent editorial took a more nuanced view, though it fell into a very easy trap.
The August 2 editorial entitled: “Israel must stop helping Hamas to win,” acknowledged a number of key points widely ignored in the news media, including that “food aid has been stolen” by terrorists, that “data on civilian casualties from the Hamas-run health ministry are misleading,” and that “Hamas propaganda has sought to exaggerate certain instances of suffering.”
And perhaps most importantly, it recognized that the scheduled recognition of a Palestinian state by France, the United Kingdom and Canada sends a clear message to Palestinian terrorists that “radicalism and armed aggression, not diplomacy, will get results.”
While this already represents a significant departure from the overwhelmingly and selectively one-sided coverage and commentary provided in the Canadian news media, the editorial soon made a number of false or misleading statements.
The editorial said that “doubt has been cast on Israeli allegations of systemic looting.” In truth, data from the United Nations of all places demonstrates that the vast majority of aid not delivered from the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has been intercepted and looted. If that is not “systemic,” then what is?
The main argument presented was that “the Israeli government’s intentional policy of restricting aid flowing into Gaza” is causing it to lose the benefits of its military successes on the ground.
It is this claim which the entire editorial stands – that Israel is deliberately “restricting aid into Gaza” – is completely and utterly false.
Beyond a short period in the spring of 2025 where aid deliveries were halted into Gaza (though preceded by a huge burst of aid that was more than enough to sustain the enclave’s population throughout that short suspension), there has been no restriction of aid, either before then, or after.
COGAT, the Israeli agency managing aid into Gaza, has repeatedly stressed throughout the duration of the war, that there is “no limit to the amount of humanitarian aid that can be sent to the people of Gaza,” a statement that it made again just days before the editorial was published.
Over the last two months, since the GHF was created (primarily to circumvent theft of aid by Hamas and other armed gangs), roughly two million meals per day are entering the strip, most of it paid for by the Israeli taxpayer. And that could be even higher, if it weren’t for supposedly “humanitarian” organizations boycotting the GHF, adamantly refusing to work with it to help deliver aid to the people of Gaza.
In fact, this obstructionism from the very same groups being fawned over by Canadian news media outlets has created a remarkable sight where hundreds of pallets of aid sit in Gaza, waiting for these agencies to pick them up and deliver them, if only they weren’t refusing to do so.
While the editorial rightly acknowledges that Hamas has used propaganda to create images of suffering, it downplays the extent to which this is true. Hamas does not simply embellish images of suffering; it concocts them, creating a picture for the international community that is so detached from the reality on the ground that it is little more than fiction.
Whether it was The New York Times pulling back claims of an emaciated Gaza boy after it was revealed he was suffering from health defects (while his mother and brother were clearly healthy), to global media outlets using anti-Israel activists in Gaza who have staged photos to pull on the heartstrings of readers, what the world has seen is not the truth, but a carefully constructed version of it.
While The Globe & Mail editorial makes some important concessions – rarely noted almost anywhere in the Canadian media – it nevertheless accepted as true a number of anti-Israel claims which cannot be supported by the available evidence.
