Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to shut down news network Al Jazeera following the passage Monday of a sweeping law allowing the government to ban foreign networks perceived as posing a threat to national security.
Al Jazeera Media Network, which has produced dogged, on the ground reporting of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, slammed the decision in a statement, vowing it would not stop the network from continuing its “bold and professional coverage.”
Blocking Al Jazeera “marks an alarming escalation, and Israeli efforts restrict the freedom of the press and further limit the access that citizens of the world have to the daily realities in Israel and Palestine,” Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine Director Omar Shakir told CNN.
The White House also called reports of the move to shutter Al Jazeera “concerning.”
This is more about denying Al-Jazeera and/or any ‘hostile’ media groups a location or office to station journalists. Qatar could broker a deal to set up high power broadcast towers along the border, plus there’s the internet, denying Israelis and Palestinians the ability to see Al-Jazeera content is not the goal.
The goal is to stop you and I from seeing what has been happening since Oct 7th, or make reporting with any hope of accuracy impossible. Without an office to base journalists to do fact-checks, interviews, on scene investigations, etc they are forced to rely on the same bad methods as someone overseas - public information and social media.