Israel ordered the local offices of Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite news network to close Sunday, escalating a long-running feud between the broadcaster and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line government as Doha-mediated cease-fire negotiations with Hamas hang in the balance.
The extraordinary order, which includes confiscating broadcast equipment, preventing the broadcast of the channel’s reports and blocking its websites, is believed to be the first time Israel has ever shuttered a foreign news outlet.
Al Jazeera went off Israel’s main cable and satellite providers in the hours after the order. However, its website and multiple online streaming links still operated Sunday.
The network has reported the Israeli-Hamas war nonstop since the militants’ initial cross-border attack Oct. 7 and has maintained 24-hour coverage in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s grinding ground offensive that has killed and wounded members of its own staff. While including on-the-ground reporting of the war’s casualties, its Arabic arm often publishes verbatim video statements from Hamas and other militant groups in the region
UPDATED – Israeli authorities raid Al Jazeera after shutdown order
True; but it’s made much easier when you’ve destroyed all the infrastructure that keeps those phones/cameras charged and transmits the photos and video.
Batteries only last so long, and you’ve still gotta be able to send the data somehow.
Batteries can be charged via solar panels and internet can be reached via satellite. I agree, it’s not as easy, but it is still very doable by a lot of people if they have the equipment. If I were Al Jazeera, I would be doing what I could to smuggle that equipment into Gaza.
Which is why we need to find a way to get radios and mesh networks to the Palestinian people.
All this money being spent as if its an ad campaign, we could do a lot more if we could safely get the supplies in and keep them out of Israeli and Hamas hands.
I don’t know if a mesh network would be as good an idea as using satellite internet since all the routers in the mesh network would need to be powered.
And I don’t necessarily mean Starlink. There are other options, they just have higher latency because they’re in a higher orbit.
I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks for pointing that out.
Something like Briar could be used to exchange messages between devices over Bluetooth, but it still end up using a fair amount of battery which is a problem when you don’t have access to a reliable power grid, and it’s Android-only…
I would imagine the people of Palestine with phones are overwhelmingly on android.
I would imagine most of their internet infrastructure is down though.
Yeah… at least you can share the app installer without Internet, and communications done on the mesh can be transmitted online as long as one single node can get Internet access.