In her March 23 article for CBC News entitled: “This volunteer doctor arrived in Gaza during the ceasefire. On Tuesday, the war began again” reporter Yasmine Hassan detailed how Feroze Sidhwa, “a California-based general, trauma, and critical care surgeon, is volunteering with MedGlobal at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis.”

Hassan, characteristically, only nominally mentioned the impact of the war on Israel, writing that “the war was sparked after a Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, killed about 1,200 people and took some 250 others captive, according to Israeli tallies. Israel responded with a military campaign in which more than 49,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza health officials. Thousands more are feared still buried and uncounted under the rubble.”

This attempt at numerical equivalence belies the core of the conflict. The October 7, 2023 massacres by Palestinian terrorists, where they bonded, raped, mutilated, and murdered 1,200 Israelis going about their daily lives, as well as taking over 250 hostages, was an event that they intend to repeat, as they’ve made clear. Hamas aims to annihilate Israel and create an Islamic-style caliphate in its place. They declare it with fervor.

Israel has therefore been forced into a war of self-defence against an enemy that uses its own people as human shields, hiding amid densely populated, vulnerable civilian populations, such as schools and hospitals.

In fact, the Israeli military posted on X (formerly Twitter) that they had precisely targeted a senior Hamas official who was hiding in Nasser Hospital, where Sidhwa was volunteering. Yet Hassan made no mention of Hamas terrorists using patients for cover, even though it isn’t new, with terrorists shooting from the emergency and maternity wards in Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital in March, 2024, as just one example.

Hassan likewise quoted the “Gaza health officials” figures without clarifying that this is controlled by Hamas terrorists. Shockingly, she didn’t point out that these include the tens of thousands of Hamas fighters killed, neither did she mention the multiple reports that have debunked these casualty figures, which have found scores of inaccuracies including men listed as women to inflate the female death count, and the inclusion of natural deaths, among others.

Even Hamas’ own figures, recently and quietly revised down, flies in the face of the terrorist group’s own disinformation campaign, with Hamas admitting that 72% of deaths are combat-aged men.

Hassan wrote that “on March 18, Israel resumed its bombing campaign, resulting in almost 600 dead, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and leaving the first phase of the ceasefire in shambles. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this was ‘just the beginning’ as Israel launched a ground invasion to put pressure on Hamas to release all remaining hostages.”

Hassan’s nominal mention of the hostages glosses over the fact that 59 people have been held for an unbelievable 544 days and that hostages who have returned detail sexual, physical, and psychological abuse in captivity, including being beaten while trussed and tied to a stick upside down, sexually abused, and starved. Many of those still held are believed dead, yet Hamas still refuses to return their corpses.

Hassan did, however, describe the suffering in Gaza and the hospital at length.

War is indisputably terrible. Yet blaming the wrong party only serves to whitewash Hamas’ operative role in starting and continuing the war when they could halt it in its tracks at any point by releasing all the hostages. To many Gazans, it is clear who the guilty party is, as seen by their demonstrations against Hamas – detailed by Hassan herself only two days after this article was published.

Journalism ought to include context, to allow the reader to come to an overall conclusion, yet Hassan largely denies them that opportunity, and in doing so is backed up by CBC News. Sanitizing the full role of a proscribed terror organization in the process ought to be protested.