Al Jazeera Is Banned, Again

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Last May, the Israeli government—invoking new emergency powers allowing it to act against foreign broadcasters that it perceives as endangering national security—temporarily banned Al Jazeera, the influential network that broadcasts in both Arabic and English, from operating inside Israeli territory and dispatched agents to raid its offices in a hotel in Jerusalem, where they confiscated equipment. Israeli officials accused Al Jazeera of being a mouthpiece for Hamas—the militant group that controls Gaza and attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing well over a thousand people—and of inciting further violence. The Israeli ban “may have come to many as a disappointment,” Ayodeji Rotinwa wrote for CJR at the time, but “it should not have been a surprise”; as the academic Amit Schejter noted to Rotinwa, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has “no respect for freedom of the press.” A few months later, Israeli soldiers also raided Al Jazeera’s offices in Ramallah, in the West Bank, again issuing a temporary shutdown order and confiscating equipment. A witness told CNN at the time that the soldiers breached the building’s entrance using explosives.

This week, Al Jazeera broadcast a video showing law enforcement officials entering a hotel room in Ramallah and handing one of its journalists a letter ordering a ban on its operations. This time, though, the officials weren’t from the Israeli government but from the Palestinian Authority, or PA—the body, dominated by the political party Fatah, that administers parts of the West Bank (but not Gaza, where Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2000s, then forced it out). As the New York Times notes, there has long been “bad blood” between Fatah and Al Jazeera, with the former seeing the latter as pro-Hamas; nor—according to Noga Tarnopolsky, the Jerusalem correspondent for France 24—is there any love lost between Fatah and Qatar, the country that funds Al Jazeera. (Tarnopolsky even suggested that the Fatah-controlled PA might have moved against Al Jazeera to “put itself on the right side” of the incoming Trump administration in the US.) The PA characterized its decision to ban Al Jazeera from operating under its jurisdiction as temporary, suggesting that it would be reversed when the broadcaster comes into compliance with regulations that it is supposedly breaching. But officials also accused it of trying to “provoke strife and interfere in Palestinian internal affairs,” by disseminating “misleading reports” and “inciting materials.”

Beyond the complicated web of factional and geopolitical considerations that formed the backdrop to the decision, the more immediate context was Al Jazeera’s coverage of recent operations that the PA’s security forces have conducted against Palestinian fighters, some of whom reportedly have ties to Hamas and other militant groups, in Jenin and other parts of the West Bank. Last week, Fatah moved to block Al Jazeera from reporting from Jenin and other locations, while urging residents to shun the broadcaster; then came this week’s formal suspension order. While the order did not outline specific examples of coverage that constituted misinformation or incitement, a Fatah official pointed the Times to a satirical skit accusing the PA of cooperating with Israel to crush the Palestinian resistance. Officials had also criticized Al Jazeera for its coverage of the killing of Shatha al-Sabbagh, a young Palestinian journalist who was shot in the head in Jenin last weekend. Al Jazeera invited a PA spokesperson on air to discuss the incident, apparently without telling him that he would be appearing with Sabbagh’s mother, who accused PA forces of killing her daughter. The spokesperson denied this and accused Al Jazeera of taking advantage of the mother’s pain.

Palestinian officials haven’t been the only ones to criticize Al Jazeera’s coverage of the recent operations: on New Year’s Eve, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate said in a statement that it had received complaints from some of its journalist members, and that an ethics panel had since concluded that Al Jazeera had published materials that “constitute hate speech and contain deliberate misinformation,” posing “a threat to Palestinian social cohesion” and demonstrating “a preference for incitement over objective reporting.” Yesterday, however, the syndicate came out against the PA’s decision to ban Al Jazeera, reiterating a call for the broadcaster to “comply with journalistic ethics and to cease its policy of incitement” but also stressing the importance of media freedom. And many other observers—from Palestinian lawyers and politicians to international governments and press-freedom groups—were more harshly critical. Al Jazeera itself reacted with fury, attacking the ban as being “in line with the occupation’s actions against its staff” (a reference to Israel’s actions) and a blatant attempt to censor coverage of events in the West Bank.

The PA’s laws theoretically guarantee press freedom, but Reporters Without Borders notes that in practice, this has been threatened under the organization’s watch, including by a cybercrimes law pushed through in 2017; since then, Palestinian security forces have been accused of assaulting or arresting journalists on several occasions. According to CNN, this is the first time that Palestinian officials have taken such severe legal action against Al Jazeera, specifically. But the ban is not without precedent in the Arab world: as Rotinwa reported last year, the broadcaster has been banished from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, and accused by various governments of platforming extremists. Rotinwa also noted that while Israel may have used wartime powers to ban Al Jazeera last year, its desire to do so wasn’t new—Netanyahu called for similar action to be taken as far back as 2017.

Again, the recent bans of Al Jazeera—by both Israel and, now, the PA—come in the context of a long and knotted history of regional contestation and attempts by a range of actors to suppress press freedom. (A case in point, perhaps, is that Hamas has been among the critics of the PA ban, characterizing it, apparently without irony, as a shameful repression of dissent.) And yet the bans clearly cannot be separated from the recent context of the war in Gaza, which Israel has continued to bombard since the Hamas attack of October 7. The blitz has taken a devastating toll on media workers, not least from Al Jazeera, which, as Rotinwa noted, is one of the few international outlets with reporters on the ground in Gaza. (Israeli officials have refused to let outside reporters enter without a military escort.) When Rotinwa wrote last June, at least three Al Jazeera staffers in Gaza had already been killed in Israeli strikes, with the broadcaster accusing the Israeli military of targeting them; Israel has denied that it targets journalists, though it suggested that it had indeed targeted two of the Al Jazeera staffers because they had ties to militants, an assertion that has been strongly challenged by Al Jazeera and third-party reporting. Since Rotinwa wrote, at least two other media workers affiliated with Al Jazeera have been killed in Gaza, and others have been injured. One, Fadi Al Wahidi, was shot in the neck by Israeli forces in October. According to a colleague, yesterday was his twenty-fifth birthday. Despite the severity of his injuries, he has not yet been able to leave Gaza to receive treatment.

Also yesterday, Al Jazeera spoke with journalists at a Gaza hospital where they have set up camp due to the relative availability of internet there. One media worker described the PA’s decision to ban Al Jazeera as a “crime against journalism.” Another accused the PA of bolstering an Israeli narrative that “justifies the targeting of Palestinian journalists.” You can read more reaction here, and Rotinwa’s article on Israel banning Al Jazeera here.

Other notable stories:

• On New Year’s Day, an assailant apparently inspired by the terror group ISIS drove a rented truck into a crowd in New Orleans, killing fourteen people. Fox News initially reported that the truck in question had been driven across the US border with Mexico two days earlier; the network walked this back after establishing that the truck was at the border two months ago, and that someone else had been driving it, but as CNN’s Brian Stelter reported yesterday, senior Republicans—including Donald Trump—had already started to spread false claims of immigrant culpability. (The assailant has now been identified as a US citizen and military veteran—not that this has fully curbed the GOP narrative.) Media Matters for America’s Matt Gertz made the case that the episode marked the resumption of the “Trump-Fox feedback loop.”

• Yesterday, a federal appeals court overturned so-called “net neutrality” rules imposed by the Federal Communications Commission, arguing that the agency had stepped beyond its legal authority and citing a recent Supreme Court decision that overturned a long-standing precedent that afforded regulatory deference to government agencies. The net neutrality rules—first implemented under the Obama administration, then reinstated under President Biden after they were repealed under Trump—were aimed at regulating internet providers like utilities and blocking them from making it harder to access certain content online. Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to lead the FCC, had criticized the rules. (Kyle Paoletta recently profiled Carr for CJR.)

• Also yesterday, Gannett, America’s largest chain of local news publishers by circulation, announced a new partnership with the news agency Reuters that will see the two organizations “bundle” their content, a move that “opens up a new content syndication revenue stream for Gannett,” as Sara Fischer reports for Axios, while allowing Reuters to expand the reach of its content across America’s local news outlets. Writing on Substack, Matt Pearce, a former reporter at the LA Times, criticized the tie-up, arguing that it constitutes financial interests seeking to outcompete the Associated Press, a news agency run as a cooperative nonprofit.

• In recent days, several star political reporters have announced that they are leaving the Washington Post: Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer are headed to The Atlantic, while Tyler Pager will join the Times. The departures continue a recent exodus from the paper, which is reportedly going through a period of low morale and leadership chaos. Before Christmas, Axios reported that two top external candidates to become the Post’s new editor withdrew from contention over strategy concerns; per Puck, Matt Murray, the interim top editor, is now expected to get the job permanently. 

• And Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, announced a big personnel change on the eve of the new Trump administration: Joel Kaplan, a leading staffer with ties to prominent Republicans, is being promoted to oversee global policy and regulatory issues at the company, succeeding Nick Clegg, who will depart. Clegg, a liberal former deputy prime minister of the UK (who I profiled when he joined Meta in 2018), called Kaplan “quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time.”

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.