Last week, left-wing Israeli magazine +972 released a report claiming far higher civilian casualties in Gaza than anything the IDF has admitted. The report might be a scandal—if it was true. Its dubious credibility and significant flaws didn’t stop CBC News senior writer Kevin Maimann from jumping to write about it, however. In an August 22 piece, Maimann shared findings from the report, claiming that five out of six Gazans (83%) killed are civilians. The report’s conclusion was apparently based on Israeli military data and Hamas Health Ministry figures.

Maimann treated the report as 100% credible without addressing significant flaws in its data, methodology and sources, using it as a springboard for activists who painted Israel’s self-defense as a genocide.

For example, Annelle Sheline with the Soros-funded Quincy Institute, an organization that seems to exist only to demonize Israel and appease terrorists, was quoted by Maimann as saying the report “reaffirms what should have been obvious.” She didn’t make an outright genocide claim, probably realizing this charge is unproven. Instead, she carefully worded it as, “what I would characterize as genocide.”

Other experts echoed the genocide claim. United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, for example, high priestess of the UN’s “cult of hatred.” Last month, she said Israel was perpetrating “one of the cruelest genocides in modern history.” Albanese liberally appropriates Holocaust imagery to build sympathy for Gaza. She famously questioned the veracity of Israeli sexual abuse survivors after the attacks of Oct 7, 2023, and in 2022 spoke at a Hamas conference, saying “You have the right to fight Israel.” Yet Maimann quoted her, without irony, as an objective source.

True, Maimann did make it seem as though he’d reached out to the IDF for comment as well. But while he quoted part of an official IDF X (Twitter) post saying the report’s numbers are incorrect, he left out the most important part: “the claims presented in the article are not only false but also reflect a fundamental lack of military understanding.”

To help him understand military realities, Maimann could easily have found reliable sources online dissecting the report. CAMERA, for example, has proven that the report “collapses under the lightest scrutiny.” Another commentator helpfully categorized the report’s major flaws:

• First, it is rife with data distortion. The report relied on a single, partial, anonymous database. Individuals were only listed as militants if their name also appeared on Israel’s lists—even if they were in uniform or carrying weapons.
• Second, it relied only on Hamas reported data sources – The Hamas Ministry of Health has a history of reclassifying fighters as civilians as well as playing fast and loose with death-toll numbers. Ignored was how Israel claims to have killed 22,000 terrorists. IDF officials say that the combatant-to-civilian deaths ratio has remained relatively the same throughout the war, with two to three civilians killed for every dead Hamas terror operative.
• Third, the report only counted Hamas (and possibly PIJ) fighters despite other terrorist groups operating in Gaza, resulting in a significant under-reporting of terrorist fighters.
• Fourth, the report compared the death toll in Gaza to the siege of Mariupol by Russia in 2022. Yet the number for Mariupol, under similar tough urban combat conditions, is 95%— far higher collateral damage than the 83% the report claims for Gaza.

Make no mistake. Despite its name – a reference to Israel’s telephone country code – +972 Magazine is actually an activist outlet with a serious anti-Israel axe to grind. One objective fact check, for example, reported that +972 Magazine “articles tend to lean left… utilize[ing] emotionally loaded words in their headlines… [and] story selection is negative toward Israeli policy concerning the Palestinians.” NGO Monitor reports that +972 Magazine has supported BDS and regularly uses terms like “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.”

Despite these many flaws, Maimann stuck to his agenda in painting an Israeli genocide. In fact, he even upped the ante at the end by suggesting that the actual death toll in Gaza might be far higher than what Hamas is telling us. This, he claimed, is because they don’t record deaths by starvation – something that’s patently untrue. In fact, numerous CBC articles (such as this one and this one) cite Gaza health ministry figures for starvation, malnutrition, and other metrics.

But Maimann clearly didn’t let a few facts get in the way of his focused attack on Israel.

Honest Reporting Canada has previously responded to serious reporting flaws in previous articles by Maimann, including one in which he blamed Israel for environmental devastation in Gaza while exonerating Hamas and other terrorist groups. As we mentioned at the time, Maimann also writes for The Breach, a partially taxpayer-funded publication known for its strong left bias and anti-Israel stance.

When reporters abandon impartiality and platform highly biased sources—and when they selectively omit information to support a predetermined narrative—they’re no longer practicing journalism at all. Articles like Maimann’s are thinly disguised activism, an open call to demonize Israel, in this case based on a report about as substantial as a house of cards.