On January 17, YGK News, a news platform that claims “to bridge the resident and student communities in Kingston,” reported on a recent small anti-Israel protest in the eastern Ontario city.

The article entitled: “Rally in Kingston marks 100 days of devastation in Gaza,” written by reporter Owen Fullerton, shared the views of those in attendance at the demonstration, but severely blurred the line between truth and fiction.

Providing background on the conflict, Fullerton wrote that: “An invasion by Hamas on October 7 was responsible for the deaths of over 1,200 Israeli citizens and over 200 taken hostage,” before making the unsubstantiated statement that Hamas’ attack “kicked off an indiscriminate Israeli military retaliation that has been unrelenting…”

While many of Israel’s detractors certainly argue that Israel is indiscriminately bombing Gaza, there is no evidence to back up their contention. In fact, there is extensive evidence entirely to the contrary.

Indiscriminate, which means done at random or without careful judgement, can hardly be the adjectives used to describe Israel’s war with Hamas.

As seen by satellite mapping showing the impact of Israel’s counter-terrorism efforts in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s air strikes have clearly been methodical in nature, not indiscriminate, showing a clear pattern in some areas while largely avoiding other places. Had Israel been indiscriminately bombing Gaza, these patterns would look entirely different.

Additionally, these targets also closely resemble the areas of known and estimated Hamas subterranean terror tunnels, where the Islamic terrorist group has stored weapons, kidnapped Israeli hostages, and where many of its senior leaders are thought to be hiding.

Even if YGK News’ coverage of the rally was an opinion column, such an allegation would be without merit. But Fullerton’s piece was a news article, which makes his statement problematic both factually and with respect to journalistic standards.

Fullerton also told readers that Israel’s counter-terrorism efforts have “killed an average of 250 Palestinians per day.” What he does not add is that all casualty figures from Gaza are not authoritative, and only come from one ultimate source: Hamas, via its so-called “Gaza Ministry of Health.”

Hamas is not only a fanatical jihadist organization; it also has a history of lying to the world to present itself as less demonic than it is in reality. Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas leader, told a Lebanese interviewer in October that the group did not mean to massacre innocent civilians during their October 7 attack, and only did so in confusion, a cheap defence easily debunked by Hamas’ own extensive video footage of the killings, where they murdered innocent people gleefully.

In the same interview, Hamad promised that Hamas would carry out more massacres like October 7 again and again. Hamas can hardly be a credible source for casualty data, but Fullerton presents their data unquestionably.

Throughout the article, Fullerton quoted Zainab Naqvi, a volunteer with Queen’s Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), an anti-Israel group at Queen’s University in Kingston.

Naqvi was quoted in the article as saying that she wants “to see the MP (Members of Parliament) take a clear stance calling for a ceasefire and also outlining the genocide that’s happening in Palestine.”

Following Naqvi’s unjustified statement accusing Israel of genocide, nowhere in the article did Fullerton point out that prior to Hamas’ massacre in October, a ceasefire was already in place between the two parties.

SPHR at Queen’s University is one chapter of a larger branch of controversial anti-Israel organizations. Only four days after Hamas’ genocidal massacre in early October, two other branches of SPHR in Montreal released a joint statement where they justified Hamas’ mass killing of innocent people, writing that “a population living under siege and occupation has no right but to resist.” Readers of YGK News would have benefitted with the knowledge that a rally held in Kingston was planned by a group affiliated with other organizations making such grotesque statements. The YGK article, while reporting on a legitimate news story, repeated anti-Israel propaganda, and passed it off as fact, all while failing to provide readers with much-needed context.