Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera is the state-funded satellite news network of the government of Qatar, launched in 1996 by the country’s ruling Emir to project a tiny Gulf monarchy’s influence across the Arab world, and its coverage of the region’s wars has repeatedly collapsed the line between reporting the conflict and participating in it. Its Arabic channel has been the preferred platform for interviews with the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis; Israel, Egypt, and a bloc of Al Jazeera’s own Gulf neighbors have each shut down or banned its operations at different points since 2013; and in October 2024 Israeli military intelligence named six of its own correspondents as serving Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives, backed by personnel and payroll documents it says it recovered in Gaza.

What it is

Al Jazeera launched on 1 November 1996 in Doha, funded by Qatar’s then-ruling Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who seized power from his father in a 1995 palace coup and used the new channel as a tool of the small state’s outsized regional ambitions. The Emir guaranteed the network government financial backing for its first five years; it began continuous programming in 1999, launched an English-language channel in 2006, and ran a US channel, Al Jazeera America, from 2013 until it closed in 2016. The network has grown into the Al Jazeera Media Network, an umbrella covering Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Jazeera English, the youth-oriented digital arm AJ+, Al Jazeera Mubasher, and an investigative unit. Its audience and bureau figures, widely repeated in press coverage, come from the network’s own promotional material and have never been independently audited. What is not in dispute is who pays: the Qatari state has covered the network’s losses since its founding, the network publishes no detailed budget, and government-appointed officials, including members of Qatar’s ruling family, have held senior positions in its management.

The record

Al Jazeera built its early reputation by breaking the mold of state-controlled Arab broadcasting and, after 11 September 2001, by becoming the primary global outlet through which Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda released video statements. During the 2011 Arab Spring, its Arabic coverage sided openly with Muslim Brotherhood-aligned movements, especially in Egypt, where the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi won the presidency in 2012. After the Egyptian military overthrew Morsi in July 2013, Cairo banned Al Jazeera and in December 2013 arrested three of its journalists, Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy, and Baher Mohamed, on charges of “conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood.” Greste was sentenced to seven years and deported after 13 months; a retrial convicted all three again in absentia in August 2015. In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt cut ties with Qatar and imposed a blockade, listing the closure of Al Jazeera among 13 demands to end the crisis; Qatar refused, and the blockade ended in January 2021 with the network still broadcasting.

The October 7 war produced the network’s heaviest losses and its heaviest scrutiny at once. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh lost his wife, son, daughter, and grandson in an Israeli strike on Nuseirat on 25 October 2023; his cameraman Samer Abudaqa was killed on 14 December 2023 in a strike that also wounded Dahdouh; Dahdouh’s eldest son and Al Jazeera colleague Hamza was killed on 7 January 2024. On 1 April 2024 Israel’s Knesset passed a law allowing the government to shut down foreign broadcasters it deems a security threat during wartime, and on 5 May 2024 the cabinet voted unanimously to close Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, with Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi ordering the seizure of its cameras, servers, and broadcast equipment. On 23 October 2024, Israeli military intelligence released documents it said were recovered in Gaza naming six Al Jazeera correspondents, Anas al-Sharif, Alaa Salameh, Hossam Shabat, Ashraf al-Sarraj, Ismail Abu Omar, and Talal al-Arrouqi, as Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives, citing personnel tables, training-course rosters, and salary records. Al Jazeera called the allegations fabricated and said Israel was using them as cover to justify killing journalists.

Its relationship to Israel and the region

Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel is, by its own long editorial record, the friendliest major international platform available to Israel’s armed adversaries. Its interviewers have given Hezbollah leaders, Hamas figures such as the late Khaled Meshaal, Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesmen, and Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea recurring, largely uncontested airtime over decades, routinely describing their fighters killed in action as “martyrs,” the same framing the groups use for themselves. Its coverage of Israeli officials and IDF operations, by contrast, is adversarial as a matter of house style. Al Jazeera English, aimed at a Western audience, is generally more measured than the Arabic channel aimed at the region, a real and consistent gap between what the network tells its two audiences. During the 2011 to 2013 period, its coverage also favored the Muslim Brotherhood and Brotherhood-aligned movements including Fatah’s Islamist rivals across the region, a pattern critics trace to the Qatari government’s own decades-long patronage of Brotherhood-linked groups and, since 2012, its hosting of Hamas’s political bureau in Doha.

The strongest case for the network, and the line it never crosses

The best argument for Al Jazeera is that it is a real news organization rather than a propaganda studio: at launch in 1996 it was the first Arab satellite channel to broadcast material other state censors in the region blocked, it interviewed dissidents nobody else would touch, and its bureau network gives it reach few outlets can match. Its Gaza staff have paid a real price covering this war; Wael al-Dahdouh’s loss of four family members in a single strike is documented, not fabricated.

That case has a hard limit, and Britannica’s own entry on the network marks it. For all its openness elsewhere, observers have long noted the hesitation in its criticism of Qatari policy, especially in Arabic. When the 2022 World Cup brought global scrutiny of corruption and migrant-labor deaths in Qatar, the network’s coverage of the controversy took a generally pro-government line. When the Gulf states blockaded Qatar from 2017 to 2022, coverage of the blockade was muffled. A newsroom that will interrogate every government in the region except the one signing its checks is not practicing journalism at that point, it is practicing foreign policy. That is the same instrument pointed at Israel every day, and it is why the network’s framing of this war should be read as the position of a government, because that is what it is.

Designations and government scrutiny

No government has designated Al Jazeera itself a terrorist organization; the scrutiny it has drawn is of a different kind, aimed at its state funding and editorial alignment rather than at the network as an armed group. Egypt banned it outright and imprisoned its journalists from 2013 to 2015. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt demanded its closure as a term of ending the 2017 to 2021 Qatar blockade. In the United States, a group of senators and representatives asked the Justice Department in 2019 to evaluate whether Al Jazeera should register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, pointing to its Qatari state ownership, the presence of the ruling family in its management, and editorial alignment with Qatari government positions on the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Israel; the Justice Department has never required the registration. Israel’s April 2024 law and the cabinet’s May 2024 closure vote represent the most direct state action taken against the network to date. The Committee to Protect Journalists, which has separately documented the deaths of Al Jazeera staff in the war, condemned the closure as a dangerous precedent for press freedom; it has not disputed the documents naming six of the network’s correspondents as Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives, the finding Israel gave as the reason for the closure in the first place.