Hamas condemns Israeli bill allowing closure of foreign media without court approval
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The Palestinian Resistance Movement, Hamas, has condemned the Israeli Knesset’s (parliament) initial approval of a bill granting the government the power to shut down foreign media outlets without prior judicial review, calling it an effort to conceal Israel’s crimes and suppress press freedom.
In a statement on Tuesday, Izzat al-Rishq, head of Hamas’s media office, said the Knesset’s vote on the bill represents “a direct threat to press freedom and a reinforcement of the policy of silencing dissenting voices.”
He accused Israel of seeking to “prevent the world from learning the truth about the occupation’s crimes and aggression against the Palestinian people,” adding that much of the content deemed harmful to state security “actually exposes crimes of killing, displacement, settlement expansion, Judaisation, and home demolitions.”
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the proposed measure would make permanent what is informally known as the “Al Jazeera Law”—a temporary provision passed in April 2024 allowing the government to close foreign media organisations operating in Israel for national security reasons. That law required judicial approval and was originally used to suspend the operations of the Qatari network Al Jazeera.
Under the new bill, the prime minister and communications minister could order the closure of foreign outlets without judicial oversight, significantly expanding executive powers over the press.
Al-Rishq urged international governments, human rights groups, and press unions to act “to repeal this legislation,” which he described as evidence of Israel’s “intention to escalate its crimes and hide the truth from the world.”
He also called on international journalists and media organizations to demand access to the occupied Palestinian territories to report “objectively and professionally on the reality of the situation.”
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This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
