Canada

The largest Canadian newspapers have given disproportionate attention to the deaths of Israelis, portrayed Israelis in more humanized ways, characterized their deaths as more worthy of indignation, and more often identified who was responsible for killing them, a comprehensive comparison of reporting on the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians reveals.

The Breach analyzed thousands of sentences in coverage in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and National Post from Oct. 7 to Nov. 24. The study found that dozens of Palestinian deaths were required to merit just one mention in the newspapers, while there was one mention of Israeli deaths for every two Israelis who died.

The study shows a pattern of anti-Palestinian bias in Canada’s establishment media, sanitizing political violence against Palestinians and unequally stirring emotions about Israeli deaths.

Despite the unprecedented scale of Israeli bombing that has killed 20,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, the newspapers have never used emotionally evocative terms like “massacre” or “slaughter” to describe their deaths. Meanwhile, they regularly used those terms to describe the Hamas attack on Israelis on Oct. 7, when militants killed 1,139 people.