It sounds like a heart-wrenching story out of a fiction novel. A mother reunited with her 17-year-old son, who hadn’t been in touch for a year, amidst war, in jail and out of touch, not knowing the condition of her son.
Except it wasn’t a story of fiction, but an article published by CBC News reminiscent of sensationalized yellow journalism, which told readers about 17-year-old Muhammad Abu Sahloul, a resident of the Gaza Strip, who was released from Israeli prison after more than a year, as part of the prisoner/hostage exchange between Israel and Hamas.
The March 4 article entitled: “This mother reunited with her son 420 days after his detention. She feared he was dead,” written by reporter Yasmine Hassan, gave a breathless recounting of what Abu Sahloul alleged happened to him in Israeli prison. The report was also published on the RCI website. Hassan has penned multiple articles since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacres which offer a blatantly-one sided narrative of the Hamas-Israel war.
As Hassan reported, Abu Sahloul, speaking to CBC freelance videographer and anti-Israel propagandist Mohamed El Saife, said that “he was arrested on Jan. 24, 2024, and spent 420 days in custody, where he said he was beaten and electrocuted — the ‘worst treatment’ he had ever seen in his life.”
Hassan added that “his mother contacted organizations that would know if he was detained, but she always returned empty-handed.”
CBC also produced coverage for its TikTok channel about this incident.
Despite the striking allegations made by Abu Sahloul, namely that he was beaten and electrocuted in Israeli prison, Hassan’s article did not quote a single Israeli source who could challenge or speak to those accusations and assert that Israel says it treats all prisoners in compliance with international law. Importantly, untold by the CBC, these allegations have not been substantiated and are mere claims.
Additionally, no information was provided in the article about why Abu Sahloul spent 420 days in an Israeli prison, and what crimes he is alleged to have committed before being released as part of the deal with Hamas.
Was Abu Sahloul accused by Israel of murder, terrorism, or another violent act? Was he an accomplice perhaps? Readers were left to guess, as if such details are so inconsequential as to be ignored entirely. Instead, Hassan hastened to give details about his mother’s feelings upon her son’s release, with her quoted as telling El Saife that “the feeling is indescribable when we found out he was alive…I couldn’t imagine that Muhammad was alive, and now he’s being released.”
While the exact crimes Abu Sahloul is alleged to have carried out went unreported by CBC News, other recently-released Palestinian detainees were far from innocent. As previously reported by HonestReporting Canada, other released Palestinian prisoners include Zakaria Zubeidi, who was convicted of being involved in a terrorist bus bombing in Israel which murdered six people, Khalil Jabarin, who murdered an Israeli man in 2018, and Mahmoud Atallah, who raped a female Israeli prison guard and murdered a Palestinian woman who he believed collaborated with Israel.
Whether Abu Sahloul also carried out a violent crime or was a member or supported a terrorist group is unknown, and apparently for CBC News, simply too irrelevant to even report. But it is critically important context to mention, and CBC News, whose anti-Israel bias over the last 17 months has been both consistent and widespread, must do better in its reporting of the Middle East.
As it stands, we are of the view that this report stood in violation of the CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices as it failed to feature a comment from an Israeli official who could speak to the serious accusations Abu Sahloul made, and as it failed to mention why he was incarcerated.
