Court approves request to extend ban on Al Jazeera operations in Israel

The Tel Aviv-Jaffa District Court approves Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi’s request to renew the temporary ban on the Al Jazeera news network in Israel, whose broadcasts and website will now be blocked for an additional 45 days.

In its decision, the court finds that there is a direct and causal connection between individuals who have carried out terror attacks inside Israel and the consumption of Al Jazeera content.

It also determined that there was a “close connection” between Al Jazeera and Hamas, that some Al Jazeera reporters in Gaza had turned themselves into “assistants and partners” with Hamas, and that some of them had even carried out terror attacks.

The court’s findings are similar to its previous ruling on the first order banning Al Jazeera in Israel.

Deputy President of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa District Court Judge Haggai Brenner writes in his decision that from raw, classified material presented to him by the state to justify the ban demonstrated “the existence of a close connection” between Hamas, Al Jazeera and its reporters.

“The picture that is formed is that Al Jazeera has a number of reporters in the borders of the Gaza Strip (for sure not all of them, and not even most of them) who have crossed the line between a legitimate connection of source-journalist relations, to a connection of another type, and turned themselves into de facto assistants and partners of the Hamas terror organization, while preserving close ties and passing mutual messages,” Brenner writes.

“Other classified documents establish the conclusion that Al Jazeera is seen by the Hamas terror organization as its public diplomacy and intelligence arm,” he adds.

Brenner also says that there is a “very hard and very worrying influence” of Al Jazeera broadcasts on specific population groups in Israel, and that “this content has been the motivator, the catalyst, and the incentivizer for the activities of terrorists inside the borders of Israel,” adding that “there is no doubt that for these terrorists there is a clear and proven causal relationship between the content which Al Jazeera broadcasts and the terror attacks they carried out.”

He concluded: “We are therefore talking about actual harm to the security of the state (even if Al Jazeera did not intend for this harm).”

Al Jazeera’s broadcasts in Israel were first taken off the air, its website taken offline, its equipment seized and its offices sealed on May 5 in accordance with an emergency law passed in April allowing for foreign outlets that are deemed to be violating national security to be temporarily blocked.