Even by Nunavut standards, it was a small rally. On January 6, the northern territory saw an anti-Israel demonstration attended by a total of 17 protesters, who marched down a street in the Nunavut capital of Iqaluit to denounce Israel.

The same day, Nunatsiaq News, the self-described “newspaper of record for Nunavut,” published coverage of the protest and background context on the war between Israel and Hamas.

However, the article entitled: “‘We are all Palestinian’: 2nd Iqaluit rally calls for Gaza ceasefire,” written by reporter Jeff Pelletier, significantly misrepresented the ongoing war in the Middle East.

Pelletier wrote that “The current war in Gaza started after Oct. 7 when Hamas — a Gaza-based militant group which the Canadian government lists as a terrorist entity — launched an attack on parts of southwest Israel,” adding that “Approximately 1,200 people were killed in the attack and approximately 250 people were taken as hostages.”

A casual reader of Pelletier’s description of Hamas’ attack would reasonably conclude that on October 7, Hamas launched a military invasion of Israel. Pelletier failed to point out that, on that day, the Jewish Sabbath and a Jewish holiday, thousands of Hamas terrorists marauded through southern Israel, raping, pillaging, torturing, and dismembering, in what was the largest mass murder of Jews in nearly 80 years.

Following Israel’s reprisal, Pelletier provided significantly more detail, writing that “the Israeli Defense Force’s aggressive military campaign is estimated to have killed 22,600 people according figures from the United Nations, and displaced 1.9 million, which represents approximately 85 per cent of the Gaza population.”

Pelletier failed to point out that such death tolls in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and armed combatants, nor do they differentiate between deaths from Israeli strikes or those killed by errant Palestinian rockets. In fact, as many as one in five rockets fired from within Gaza misfires, killing Palestinians inside the coastal territory. These deaths are all counted without differentiation.

What Pelletier also failed to report is that, unlike Hamas’ attack on southern Israel which purposely targeted innocent civilians for murder, Israel’s counter-terrorism operations in the Gaza Strip are aimed at destroying Hamas, a fanatical Islamic terrorist organization.

By failing to provide this much-needed context, Pelletier falsely portrayed the war between Israel and Hamas as a kind of tit-for-tat conflict between two warring parties, only that one side (Israel) has killed more people. Readers were also deprived of knowing that the Palestinian death toll includes 8,000 Hamas fighters Israel says its soldiers killed.

Pelletier also quoted a United Nations (UN) official warning of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and that “the UN described (Gaza) as an ‘open-air prison’ in 2022,” as well as a protester who argued that “Palestinian rights are Indigenous rights.”

Just two days earlier, Nunatsiaq News published another article promoting the planned protest, “Iqaluit rally for Gaza ceasefire planned for Saturday,” written by Livete Ataguyuk. The article quoted one protest organizer, Meral Jamal, as saying that the rally was aimed at protesting Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, a veritable untruth that has been assailed as a “blood libel” in Israel.

Like Pelletier, Ataguyuk whitewashed Hamas’ October 7 massacre, referring to it as “a surprise attack” without specifying that it was a mass killing, primarily of innocent civilians.

Iqaluit is roughly 7,500 kilometres away from the Gaza Strip, and in the face of such vast distance, the need for accuracy in reporting is paramount. However, in both articles, Nunatsiaq News ­– by omitting key information – presented a highly misleading picture of the war in Gaza.