Words cannot express my gratitude to Ms. Deluce for allowing Mr. Wildeman to explain, at length and uninterrupted, the depth of the horrors that Israel has inflicted upon Palestinians in Gaza over the past two years. He was given the time and the freedom necessary to explain to your viewers the basic facts: Israel has rendered Gaza all but uninhabitable due to its near-total annihilation of the housing stock and medical infrastructure; Gazans have experienced starved; the official death toll of approximately 70,000 is clearly an undercount; as Jared Kushner said, Gaza looks like “a nuclear bomb went off there.”
Dear CTV news team:
I’m writing to you on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East to thank you for Lindsay Deluce’s outstanding interview with Jeremy Wildeman on November 10.
Words cannot express my gratitude to Ms. Deluce for allowing Mr. Wildeman to explain, at length and uninterrupted, the depth of the horrors that Israel has inflicted upon Palestinians in Gaza over the past two years. He was given the time and the freedom necessary to explain to your viewers the basic facts: Israel has rendered Gaza all but uninhabitable due to its near-total annihilation of the housing stock and medical infrastructure; Gazans have experienced starved; the official death toll of approximately 70,000 is clearly an undercount; as Jared Kushner said, Gaza looks like “a nuclear bomb went off there.”
I note that Honest Reporting Canada has published a call to action filled with ad hominem attacks and patent untruths with respect to CTV, Ms. Deluce and Mr. Wildeman. It is essential that CTV not give in to this pressure campaign, which would have you ignore basic truths in favour of the false narrative, unconnected to the facts, that HRC is pushing.
Given the seriousness of HRC’s claims, I wish to explain as briefly as I can why each of them is nonsense (note that more details on many of these points are set forth in CJPME’s recent report, The Toll of Intent).
- HRC claims that it is “beyond absurd” to claim that there might be 500,000 dead in Gaza. A 2008 meta-study notes that, in conflicts, for each direct death from violence there are generally four “indirect” deaths due to general devastation. The official death toll in Gaza, which excludes bodies buried under the rubble or that were otherwise never identified, is about 70,000. Applying that multiplier gives an estimate of 350,000 dead. Given the scale of the devastation in Gaza, the “average” multiplier almost certainly yields a very conservative figure. The cumulative effect of the doubt undercount makes 500,000 deaths an entirely plausible estimate.
- HRC claims that Gaza never experienced “anything even remotely resembling starvation.” Israel imposed a “complete siege” on Gaza immediately after October 7, 2023, including food. After letting in aid in varying amounts (but never enough to meet Gaza’s caloric requirements), for 11 weeks this spring Israel imposed a total blockade that prevented anything whatsoever from entering Gaza, again including food. Donald Trump himself acknowledged that Gaza was facing “real starvation” and experts estimated this August that a bare minimum of 10,000 Palestinians had starved to death in Gaza.
- Wildeman notes that Israel itself recognized that only 17% of the official death toll in Gaza was made up of confirmed Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters. HRC’s ludicrous rebuttal is that the other 83% were not necessarily civilians, but could have been fighters who have not yet been identified. In other words, Israel doesn’t know who it’s killed but it’s possible that its victims aren’t innocent. Any serious person would be ashamed to make such an embarrassingly poor argument.
- Wildeman accurately notes that a large number of scholars have states that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide (CJPME’s report cites a number of them). Unable to rebut the point, HRC vaguely refers to “many [unidentified] scholars” who claim otherwise, and bizarrely refer to the (unnamed) “world’s top expert on urban warfare” whose expertise on genocide is left to the reader’s imagination. They also falsely claim that Israel has taken “unprecedented steps to minimize civilian casualties” – an assertion absurd on its face given the near-total destruction of the Gaza Strip (for more details on which I refer you to CJPME’s report).
- HRC falsely claims that Amnesty International was “forced to redefine the very term” in order to accuse Israel of genocide. This is pure fiction. Amnesty’s report (see p. 101) advances a specific interpretation of the Genocide Convention, which any lawyer will confirm is a normal thing to do when making a legal argument.
- HRC describes UNRWA (the UN agency that has supported Palestinian refugees since 1949) as having been “marred by its connections to Palestinian terrorism.” Again, this is a figment of HRC’s imagination. While Israel has claimed that UNRWA staff are linked to Palestinian militant groups, it has provided no evidence to back that accusation. Indeed, Israel has received UNRWA’s staff lists since 2011 and voiced no concerns about any of them.
I again wish to thank you most sincerely and earnestly for having Mr. Wildeman on your program, and especially for allowing him to speak freely to your viewers about the plain truth of what Israel has done to Gaza. HRC’s attacks are without foundation and I would urge you, in the name of upholding journalistic standards around truth and evidence, to disregard them. Given the rarity of journalism of this type in Canada on this issue, I very much hope that you will run more high-quality reporting of this nature on your different news programs.
Sincerely,
Adam Allouba
Media Advocate
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
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