This pattern also reflects a well-documented Israeli strategy of manufacturing doubt to evade accountability for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, crimes that have contributed to circumstances under which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
To the City News and AP editorial staff,
I am writing on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (www.cjpme.org) to raise concerns about a troubling media pattern we have identified while monitoring Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza – a genocide that has been documented by leading human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and is the subject of South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice, which seeks to hold Israel accountable for acts of genocide against the Palestinian people.
This media trend has frequently taken the form of uncritically repeating Israeli claims that the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza is inflating the Palestinian death toll, or has otherwise cast suspicion on the credibility of Palestinian death toll reporting.
For instance, an article sourced from the Associated Press and published by CityNews Toronto (October 26, 2023), titled “Explainer: What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and how does it calculate the war’s death toll?” states:
“There have also been conflicting accounts of the explosion’s death toll… Israel says the ministry inflated the toll… The confusion has called into question the ministry’s credibility in the Hamas-ruled territory.”
Critically, the article omits essential context and instead amplifies the narrative that the Ministry’s numbers are not to be trusted.
Palestinian Ministry of Health official Mehdat Abbas explicitly explained that determining an immediate death toll was extraordinarily difficult because “the bodies were so dismembered, body parts were everywhere.”
All of this is particularly concerning given that, just yesterday, the Israeli army publicly accepted the accuracy of the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s death toll figures in Gaza, after years of manufacturing doubt on their reporting.
In fact, Israel has a long and documented history of spreading misinformation, which media outlets have too often amplified without sufficient scrutiny. One of the most egregious examples was the widespread circulation of false claims regarding beheaded infants following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks, claims that were later debunked but had already been amplified by the media.
This pattern also reflects a well-documented Israeli strategy of manufacturing doubt to evade accountability for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, crimes that have contributed to circumstances under which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
CityNews and AP must issue an editor’s note clearly stating that the Palestinian Health Ministry of Gaza’s figures are credible and accurate. Furthermore, in future coverage, any article that has assertions by the Israeli state or military officials casting doubt on these numbers should be explicitly identified as false in the name of accurate, fair, and ethical journalism, as outlined in CAJ guidelines.
Lynn Naji
Media Analyst
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East