Despite incessant bleating from anti-Israel activists claiming that there is a “famine” in Gaza, one of the best repudiations of that lie has come from a most unlikely source: CBC News.
In a July 25 article entitled: “This Gaza man makes videos cooking aid food for children in displacement camps,” reporter Yasmine Hassan profiled Hamada Shaqoura, a 33-year-old man in Gaza who makes cooking videos on TikTok.
In the accompanying three-minute-long video, footage is shown of bustling food markets, a curious sight for those voices who have attempted to convince the public that there is no food in Gaza.
There’s No Famine In Gaza
Yet strangely, even within Hassan’s article, she gave a platform to these unfounded assertions, writing that “The northern part of the Gaza Strip now faces a looming famine, according to reports from international organizations. Earlier this month, United Nations experts declared that ‘famine has spread across the entire Gaza Strip,’ based on the number of children dying of malnutrition and hunger,” though she added that “Israel has denied that there is a famine in Gaza.”
The so-called “United Nations experts” cited by Hassan are less than a dozen people, including Francesca Albanese, an extremist anti-Israel campaigner who has compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, hardly a credible source relating to Israel.
Meanwhile, in March, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a United Nations-backed project to gauge food insecurity in various parts of the world, claimed that famine in Gaza was imminent, before backtracking three months later in a subsequent report, saying it no longer stood behind those statements.
In mid-June, Columbia University professors Awi Federgruen and Ran Kivetz analyzed humanitarian aid coming into Gaza, as well as food production within the territory, and found that more than enough food was available for every single man, woman and child there. But once again, their report was ignored, only the most extreme and doomsday scenario merited mention in Hassan’s CBC News article.
One of the more comical elements in Hassan’s article was how she romanticized the Gaza Strip prior to Hamas’ October 7 massacres in Israel, quoting Shaqoura as saying his cooking helps “remind us of those days,” and reminiscing that “there was a period of time in Gaza where there were a lot of restaurants — Mexican restaurants, Italian restaurants related to pizza and pastries, and Western restaurants.”
Gaza Depicted By CBC As Open-Air Prison Or Shangri-La
This beautiful depiction of Gaza conflicts harshly with the image long presented by CBC News, which described Gaza as an “open-air prison,” but now that it is expedient, the broadcaster has switched tacks, making Gaza pre-October 7 seem like a Shangri-la.
Two days earlier, Hassan penned another article entitled: “Type 2 poliovirus detected in wastewater in the Gaza Strip,” which reported on instances of Polio being found in Gaza, helpfully informing readers that the World Health Organization “stressed the importance of a ceasefire” to combat the virus, though she did not share that the vast majority of Gazans, over 95% of which, are already vaccinated against Polio and since October 7, enough vaccines to serve the overwhelming majority of Gazans were sent into the territory.
As noted by HonestReporting Canada in a recent report on Hassan’s reporting for CBC News, her articles have given disproportionate sympathy to Palestinian plight and often given undeserved coverage to Hamas’ propaganda, which presents a false equivalence between a genocidal terrorist group and Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. Her latest article, in particular featuring the Gazan TikTok influencer, inadvertently shows how absurd and unfounded these allegations are, particularly regarding claims of famine.
