The shutdown does not apply to the Israeli-occupied West Bank or Gaza Strip. (File)
Doha:
Al Jazeera will try to pursue all possible legal action “to the end” to challenge Israel’s ban on its operations in the country, the TV network’s news director told AFP in an interview.
The Qatar-based station was taken off the air in Israel after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government voted on Sunday to shut it down due to coverage of the war in Gaza.
Speaking on Monday, Al Jazeera English news director Salah Nagm said the network would “follow all legal avenues”, adding: “If there is a possibility to challenge this decision, we will pursue it until the end”.
According to a cabinet decision that Netanyahu said was “unanimous”, Al Jazeera’s offices in Jerusalem were closed, its equipment confiscated and its team’s accreditations withdrawn.
“The equipment that was confiscated, the loss we suffered by stopping our transmission, all of this is subject to legal action,” Nagm said.
The Israeli government said on Sunday that the order was initially valid for 45 days, with the possibility of extension.
Hours later, screens in Israel broadcasting Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English channels went blank, apart from a message in Hebrew saying they had “been suspended in Israel.”
‘An action from the 60s’
The shutdown does not apply to the Israeli-occupied West Bank or Gaza Strip, from where Al Jazeera still broadcasts Israel’s war with Hamas live.
Al Jazeera immediately condemned Israel’s decision as “criminal”, saying on social media site X that it “violates the human right to access information”.
But Najm downplayed the ban’s impact on Al Jazeera’s coverage of the war and the public’s ability to access its content, even though its website is now blocked in Israel.
“It is an action of the 60s, and not of the 21st century, to make such a decision to close,” he said, explaining that the channel could rely on other sources of information without “people on the ground.”
“I know that people who have a VPN can watch us online at any time,” said the news director, referring to virtual private networks that establish protected connections to the Internet and can allow users to access the Internet as if they were in a different country. .
The decision came after Israel’s parliament voted last month to approve a new national security law that gives senior ministers powers to ban broadcasts from foreign channels due to security threats.
In his statement on Sunday, Netanyahu accused that “Al Jazeera correspondents undermined Israel’s security and incited IDF (Israeli military) soldiers.”
‘Arbitrary decision’
But Nagm questioned which Al Jazeera broadcasts the Israeli government considered a security threat, calling the ban an “arbitrary decision.”
Since the start of the war in Gaza, Al Jazeera’s office in the Palestinian territory has been bombed and two of its correspondents have been killed.
“Al Jazeera lost some people, their families suffered, which is really different from other conflicts in this sense,” Nagm said.
Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, was injured in an Israeli attack in December that killed the network’s cameraman.
Dahdouh’s wife, two of his children and a grandson were killed in October in a bombing of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
And Dahdouh’s eldest son, an Al Jazeera journalist, was killed along with another journalist in Rafah in January when an Israeli attack hit the car in which they were traveling.
At least 97 journalists and media professionals have been killed since the start of the war, including Palestinians, Israelis and Lebanese, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“This is not something we can politely report,” Nagm said.
“We have to be cautious and careful and make people aware of the nature of the war that is going on and how deadly it is for people and also for us as a profession.”
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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