One of the most favoured tactics of many Canadian news media outlets over the last 18 months has been to zero in on suffering inside the Gaza Strip, converting a complex situation inside the coastal territory into a cartoonishly simple picture where Israel is the perpetual villain and Hamas simply doesn’t exist at all.

An April 17 opinion column in Broadview Magazine, an official publication of the United Church of Canada and which receives funding from the Government of Canada, followed this ongoing tradition well.

Deirdre Nunan, a Saskatchewan-based surgeon who has spent years living in Gaza, penned a commentary entitled: “‘This is where I need to be:’ A Canadian doctor reports from a Gaza hospital,” where she chronicled her time in the territory, recording, for instance, that “last night, the Israeli army started bombing nearer to the hospital than during my two previous times here,” and that “we’d gone to the operating room (OR) yesterday evening, around when the Israeli military decided to start extensively bombing the area around the hospital.”

While Nunan told readers about her times inside a Gazan operating room during wartime, she apparently deemed it entirely unnecessary to explain why, not only is there a war in the first place, but any context whatsoever about why military operations might be taking place close to her.

But Nunan did not let readers come to their own conclusions; she was quick to portray Israel as a wanton aggressor attacking civilian infrastructure for no reason, quoting an unnamed colleague who allegedly said “are they only attacking health-care institutions, now?”

What Nunan carefully avoided saying is that Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic terrorist group that launched the current war with its genocidal massacres in southern Israel on October 7, 2023 – and which continues to hold dozens of Israeli hostages inside Gaza – actively and deliberately uses civilian infrastructure such as healthcare facilities for its terrorism. However, rather than acknowledge this well-documented reality, or at least Israel’s statements on this matter, Nunan effectively struck it from the record entirely.

In fact, not once in her entire column did Nunan ever mention the word “Hamas” or “terrorist,” part of an ongoing effort by anti-Israel activists to not just sanitize Palestinian terrorism, but to completely erase it from the public consciousness, and in so doing, frame Israel as a murderous regime that is attacking Palestinian hospitals for literally no reason at all.

Failing to make any mention of Hamas is not only embarrassingly poor journalism, even in an opinion column, but is also profoundly dishonest, for it so fundamentally changes the reader’s perception of what is happening in Gaza that it may as well be a work of fiction.

Nunan’s column exhorted readers to contact legislators in Ottawa, including Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, demanding that they ban weapons sales to Israel. What this act seeks to accomplish is to rob Jerusalem of its most fundamental right of self-defence against Palestinian Islamic terrorists, which is entirely unsurprising given her failure to even mention Hamas by name.

This Broadview Magazine commentary by Nunan is reminiscent of countless other instances of news coverage by Canadian outlets where foreign physicians who have visited Gaza returned only to carefully avoid mentioning any presence of Palestinian terrorists inside Gaza’s hospital infrastructure, and instead disingenuously accuse Israel of bombing Palestinians, apparently at random.

Near the end of her column, Nunan wrote that “what I’m living through right now is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced.” While that may be true, it is equally true that Hamas could end that suffering instantaneously if it so wanted, by freeing the Israeli hostages and laying down its weapons. That it refuses to do so shows that it has no interest in ending the suffering, and by lacking the courage to state this reality, Nunan is either profoundly unaware of her surroundings, or is simply hiding the truth from readers.