Al Jazeera denounces YouTube’s compliance with Israel’s ban on network 

Al Jazeera has condemned YouTube’s compliance with an Israeli law banning the network’s livestreams in the country, warning that the move signals how major tech companies can be “co-opted as instruments of regimes hostile to freedom”.

YouTube’s submission to Israel’s ban became apparent on Wednesday, days after Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karahi ordered a 90-day extension of an existing ban on the network’s operations in Israel, blocking broadcasting and internet companies from carrying the network’s content.

On Thursday, with livestreams of Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Mubasher blocked in Israel, the network denounced YouTube for failing to uphold the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

“Such principles mandate that global tech companies ensure freedom of expression and resist government pressures that lead to the withholding of the truth and the silencing of independent journalism,” it said in a statement.

“The Network stresses that this escalation is part of a broader and systematic pattern of Israeli violations, including the killing and detention of its journalists and the closure of its offices in the occupied territories, aimed at suppressing the truth.”

Israel has killed more than 270 journalists and media workers since it launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023.

Some have been from Al Jazeera, including correspondent Anas al-Sharif, 28, who was killed with three of his colleagues in an Israeli strike on a media tent in Gaza City in August.

In May 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, weeks after the Israeli parliament passed a law allowing the temporary closure of foreign broadcasters considered to be a “threat to national security”.

In September that year, Israeli forces stormed Al Jazeera’s offices in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, confiscating equipment and documents and closing the network’s office.

In December last year, the Israeli parliament approved an extension of the 2024 law, called the “Al Jazeera law”, for two more years.

In Thursday’s statement, Al Jazeera called on YouTube and other digital companies to immediately lift the ban on its channels, urging media freedom and human rights organisations join it in condemning Israel’s targeting of the media.