Government approves proposal to block Hezbollah-affiliated al Mayadeen news
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
The government approves a proposal to block Lebanon’s Hezbollah-affiliated al Mayadeen news, and Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi signs an order to confiscate the network’s equipment and block its websites.
Last November, the security cabinet voted to shut down al Mayadeen satellite news station in Israel, in line with emergency regulations allowing the government to close foreign news outlets it believes are harming national security. However, the measure expired in January.
The decision to again block the network — apparently both the transmissions and their work in Israel — came after “the re-appearance of terrorist representatives posing as journalists about two weeks ago,” a spokesman for Karhi says in a statement referring to the fact that an Al Mayadeen reporter broadcast from Majdal Shams last month, a day after a rocket fired by the terror group killed 12 children on a soccer field in the Druze town in the Golan Heights.
In her broadcast, al Mayadeen’s Hanaa Mahameed falsely claimed that the children were hit by an Israeli strike, prompting Karhi to state that the military was “invited to take [Mahameed] and throw her across the border. Letting a Hezbollah reporter broadcast from the scene of the massacre Hezbollah committed is absurd on every level.”
The new ban is being implemented via the so-called Al Jazeera law passed by the Knesset in April, which gives the government temporary powers to prevent foreign news networks from operating in Israel if they are deemed by the security services to be harming national security.
