In four recent news articles written by Sara Jabakhanji, who in 2021 signed an open letter calling for more anti-Israel news coverage, the CBC News senior writer continues to present a highly skewed narrative of the Hamas-Israel war, often egregiously so.

Her November 21 article entitled: “International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for Netanyahu, former Israeli defence minister,” reported that the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its scandal-plagued president, Karim Khan, currently under investigation for sexual misconduct, recently issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, alongside Hamas’ leaders, for war crimes.

While newsworthy, Jabakhanji’s article gave extended coverage to allegations against Israel, and far less against Hamas, quoting a report from “A UN Special Committee” alleging genocide in Gaza. The ‘special committee,’ officially called “Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories,” is not made up of experts, but of envoys from three disparate countries to the United Nations, whose entire mandate is to investigate Israel, and only Israel.

While the UN committee’s utter lack of legitimacy is not the fault of Jabakhanji, her decision to quote a group whose sole purpose is to target Israel as part of her news article is highly curious, given that she offered no perspective from any experts who disagree.

On November 25, she published another article entitled: “‘The sea took all of our things:’ Floodwaters devastate beach encampment in Khan Younis.” The article covered the situation faced by Gazans as winter approaches.

This report, like countless others of Jabakhanji, focused exclusively on the suffering of Gazans, making stories of Israelis apparently too worthless to tell readers about. Jabakhanji casually referenced “more than a year of…lack of basic items, including food…”

This is not a quote from an anti-Israel activist, but a statement, ostensibly of fact, from Jabakhanji, claiming that there has been a lack of food for more than a year in Gaza. Even by the simple rules of logic alone, this is clearly untrue, given that if there was actually a yearlong lack of basic sustenance, most Gazans would have died of starvation. That did not happen; in fact, the population of Gaza is growing, and indeed, rapidly so.

This assertion is doubly disproven by the significant data demonstrating the huge amounts of humanitarian aid entering Gaza, enough to feed the entire population of the territory. While the challenges in distributing said aid have been well-documented, Jabakhanji’s wording implied strongly that it is Israel which has capriciously prevented food from entering the strip, when that is false.

Four days later, on November 29, Jabakhanji produced another report entitled: “His daughter, two others were crushed to death waiting in line to buy bread in central Gaza,” covering a tragic story where a Palestinian mob crushed three people, including a child.

The article told readers about the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, at one point describing UNRWA, a UN agency responsible for, among other things, delivering aid into Gaza, as “an agency supporting Palestinians with which Israel has cut ties.”

No word was offered by Jabakhanji about UNRWA’s incompetent inability to deliver the huge amount of aid sent by Israel into Gaza, or about the agency’s extensive ties to Hamas terrorists – many who took part in the October 7 massacres – which prompted Israel to cut ties. Instead, as with her previous article, the implication is clear: that Israel, in an apparent attempt to harm Palestinians, cut off ties with a critical agency.

Jabakhanji also reported that “More than 44,300 people have been killed and more than 104,000 wounded in the war, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry,” completely ignoring how some 18,000 of those deaths have been Hamas terrorists, according to Israel. While Jabakhanji may or may not believe Israel, their statement is part of the record and should be recorded. Why she omitted any mention of that is anyone’s guess.

And on December 2, Jabakhanji’s report entitled: “What just happened in Aleppo, and what it means for Syria’s civil war,” while not about the Hamas-Israel conflict, nevertheless revealed a great deal about her reporting.

She mentioned in passing the Hezbollah-Israel front of Iran’s war, referring to “a year of fighting that started shortly after Israel went to war with Hamas in Gaza,” and not as Hezbollah firing rockets unprovoked into Israel in solidarity with Hamas.

Additionally, she wrote, in reference to Syria’s civil war, that “the insurgents are a coalition of Turkey-backed mainstream secular groups spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist group designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and United Nations.”

While it is not Jabakhanji or CBC News calling HTS a terrorist group, and instead simply conveying that designation, when it comes to Hamas, she refers to them as “fighters” or an “Islamist militant group,” rarely – if ever – reminding readers that Hamas is a banned terrorist group as well.

Three years ago, it was Jabakhanji who signed an open letter which demanded more anti-Israel news coverage, and her recent coverage has seen following through on that demand by producing highly imbalanced news articles on the Hamas-Israel war, spreading misinformation about aid into Gaza, and downplaying the Hamas terrorist group.