Israeli Cabinet Votes to Shut Down Al Jazeera's Operations in the Country

Israel moved on Sunday to shut down local operations of Al Jazeera, the influential Qatari-based news network, in an unusual step that critics denounced as anti-democratic and part of a broader crackdown on dissent over Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Al Jazeera, a major source of news in the Arab world that has often highlighted civilian suffering in Gaza, of harming Israel's security and inciting violence against its soldiers. Israeli officials did not immediately provide examples of Al Jazeera content it claimed posed a threat.

In a statement, Al Jazeera called the decision a "criminal act" and said that "Israel's suppression of the free press to cover up its crimes has not deterred us from performing our duty."

The shutdown order is initially for 45 days, with the option of a 45-day extension, according to the Ministry of Communications. It is directed at halting Al Jazeera's ability to transmit from Israel, and to be seen there; it was not immediately clear if, or how, the closure might affect the network's reporting in the Gaza Strip and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have called the network a "mouthpiece" for Hamas, which led the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel from Gaza that set off the war. That day, Al Jazeera repeatedly covered statements from Hamas officials calling for a violent uprising in the West Bank.

Israel has frequently criticized Al Jazeera's Arabic-language coverage, accusing it of amplifying Hamas's message and reporting uncritically on the militants' calls for violence.

But while there was concern that the closure order might have a chilling effect on other news outlets in Israel, it was unclear if it would have much practical impact beyond Israeli boundaries.

"Does anyone understand what they even want?" Aida Touma-Sliman, an Arab member of Israel's Parliament, said of Mr. Netanyahu's right-wing coalition government. Members of Israel's Arab minority have been watching Al Jazeera for decades, she said, and have not taken up arms against the state.

"It's a slippery slope," Ms. Touma-Sliman said. "Today it's Al Jazeera, tomorrow it'll be who knows who."

In any case, she said, anybody in Israel who still wants to watch Al Jazeera will find a way to do so.

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Pointing to the government's diminishing tolerance for freedom of expression, Ms. Touma-Sliman noted that in November, she was suspended from all parliamentary activities for two months after publicizing press reports about Israeli forces attacking Gaza's main hospital. The military had denied the accounts.

The closing of Al Jazeera had been under discussion in Israel for weeks. Journalism organizations on Sunday denounced it as a blow to press freedom. Reporters Without Borders strongly condemned the decision, which it called repressive. The Foreign Press Association representing Israeli and Palestinian journalists working for the international news media said Israel had joined "a dubious club of authoritarian governments" that have banned the station.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, an independent human rights organization, petitioned Israel's Supreme Court to halt the measures against Al Jazeera, saying that it had witnessed attempts to limit freedom of the press and freedom of protest in Israel throughout the war.

The closure order was a rare move for the Israeli government, though it also shuttered a Lebanese channel, Al Mayadeen, in November. Al Mayadeen is affiliated with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed organization that has been involved in tit-for-tat strikes across Israel's border with Lebanon since the start of the war. It was closed for two months.

There were signs that Israeli officials were moving quickly against Al Jazeera.

Israel's communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, said in a video statement that the network's "equipment would be confiscated." The Israeli police accompanied government officials who confiscated equipment at an Al Jazeera office at a hotel in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem and closed the office.

Israel's main cable provider, HOT, said it had stopped carrying the network. And the Communications Ministry said in a statement that access to Al Jazeera's internet sites would also be blocked, a measure that appeared to have come into effect on Sunday night.

Al Jazeera has long had a tense relationship with Israel, and it grew worse with the killing of one of its correspondents, the veteran Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, in the occupied West Bank two years ago. A New York Times investigation found that the bullet that killed her had been fired from the approximate location of an Israeli military convoy.

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The timing of the closure order raised questions with critics contending that Mr. Netanyahu might have been acting on political interests rather than on matters of national security.

The shutdown could have broad ramifications: Qatar, which helps fund the network, has been helping to mediate cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, which include the release of hostages seized in Israel on Oct. 7. The Qatari government did not immediately comment on Israel's action.

On Sunday, Israel's National Unity party — which is led by Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Israel's war cabinet — said in a statement that it supported the move against Al Jazeera but questioned its timing. The party said that the timing could "sabotage" the negotiations and that the decision stemmed from "political considerations," a possible reference to Mr. Netanyahu's need to mollify hard-line members of his governing coalition.

The war in Gaza has taken a toll on Al Jazeera's own employees and their families. In October, Wael al-Dahdouh, the Gaza bureau chief of the network's Arabic-language service, was told live on air that his wife, a son, daughter and infant grandson had been killed in central Gaza, where they had been sheltering. In January, his eldest son was killed in an Israeli airstrike, according to the authorities in Gaza.

Liam Stack, Adam Rasgon and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

— Isabel Kershner and Matthew Mpoke Bigg Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem.

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The latest round of negotiations between Israel and Hamas hit an impasse on Sunday as mediators struggled to bridge remaining gaps and a Hamas delegation departed the talks in Cairo, according to two senior Hamas officials and two other officials familiar with the talks. An Israeli official also confirmed the negotiations had stalled and described them as being in "crisis."

For months, the negotiations aimed at achieving a cease-fire and a release of hostages have made little progress, but signs the two sides were coming closer to an agreement appeared over the last week. Israel backed off some of its long-held demands and a top Hamas official said the group was studying the latest Israeli offer with a "positive spirit."

But the setback over the weekend meant Palestinians living in miserable conditions in Gaza would not experience an imminent reprieve and the families of hostages held by militants would have to wait longer for the freedom of their loved ones.

The main obstacle in the talks was the duration of a cease-fire, with Hamas demanding it be permanent and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel expressing openness to only a temporary halt in the fighting.

Hamas blamed the lack of progress on Mr. Netanyahu, who vowed again in recent days that the Israeli army will invade Rafah, the southernmost town in the Gaza Strip, with or without an agreement.

"We were very close, but Netanyahu's narrow-mindedness aborted an agreement," Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official, said in a phone interview.

Mr. Netanyahu has for weeks declared his intention to stage a ground offensive aimed at Rafah, where about a million Palestinians have been sheltering. The Biden administration has been pressing Israel to refrain from undertaking a major operation in the city.

On Sunday, Hamas fired roughly 10 rockets from the area of the Rafah border crossing, killing three soldiers near the Kerem Shalom crossing, according to Israel's military. Rocket attacks by Hamas have been relatively rare in recent months, and Israel said it had responded with airstrikes targeting the site of the launches.

The Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Israel and Hamas were closer to a deal a couple of days ago, but that Mr. Netanyahu's statements about Rafah had compelled Hamas to harden its demands in an attempt to ensure that Israeli forces won't enter the city. Hamas, the official said, was now seeking further guarantees that Israel would not implement only part of an agreement, and then resume fighting.

The official lamented that Hamas and Israel had shifted gears to playing a "blame game."

Two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, pushed back on the notion the talks were at an impasse, suggesting that parties were still reviewing details of the most recent proposals.

Mr. Netanyahu and the United States have been contending that Hamas was holding up an agreement. On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said he would not agree to the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and an end to the war. Countenancing such demands, he said, would allow Hamas to re-establish control over Gaza, rebuild their military capabilities, and threaten communities throughout Israel.

"It is Hamas that is holding up the release of our hostages," he said. "We are working in every possible way to free the hostages; this is our top priority."

An Israeli delegation never made it to Cairo for the latest round of talks. The Israeli official said that Israel had sought a written response to its latest proposal from Hamas before dispatching a delegation, but that the group never conveyed one.

Mr. Abu Marzouk said Hamas had wanted Israel to be present at the talks in Cairo, where they could have worked through mediators to clarify "vague" points in the latest Israeli offer, including on the duration of a cease-fire.

"The cease-fire needs to be permanent and fixed," he said.

Mr. Abu Marzouk was the only one of the officials who spoke about the talks to allow the use of his name. The others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject or because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Hamas, Mr. Abu Marzouk said, thought that Mr. Netanyahu wanted an agreement that would permit Israel to invade Rafah after its hostages are released.

"This is Netanyahu's plan," he said.

A technical team from the Qatari foreign ministry also left the Egyptian capital on Sunday, two officials briefed on the talks said. Bill Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, met with Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in Doha on Sunday to discuss getting the talks back on track, one of the officials said.

On Monday, Hamas's political leadership will convene in Doha to discuss what unfolded in Cairo over the past two days, but the group intended to continue participating in negotiations with "positivity," said one of the senior Hamas officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

A report in Al-Qahera News, an Egyptian state-owned television channel, said that a Hamas delegation would return to Cairo on Tuesday, but the senior Hamas official said that the group hadn't made a decision yet.

Peter Baker and Michael Crowley contributed reporting to this article.

— Adam Rasgon reporting from Jerusalem

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Hamas said on Sunday that its armed wing had fired rockets at Israeli forces near the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Gaza and Israel, in an attack that the Israeli military said killed three soldiers and left three more soldiers critically wounded.

About 14 rockets and mortars were fired from an area near the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt toward Kerem Shalom, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said at a news briefing on Sunday night. One home in the kibbutz was struck.

There was no indication that the Kerem Shalom crossing itself, one of the few crossings through which humanitarian aid is able to enter the Gaza Strip, was the target of the attack, and there was no indication that other crossings were under immediate threat, Colonel Lerner said. Still, after the attack on Sunday, the army said the Kerem Shalom crossing was closed to the passage of aid trucks.

In response, Colonel Lerner said, Israeli military planes destroyed the launcher that had fired the projectiles and targeted other "Hamas military infrastructure."

The Israeli military was anticipating the possibility of rocket attacks because of its "preparations on the ground" near the southern border, and the soldiers were guarding heavy tanks and bulldozers positioned in the area, Colonel Lerner said.

The military had "pre-positioned protective elements" for the soldiers to take cover and will conduct an internal investigation into the circumstances of their deaths and injuries, including whether they took cover as expected after sirens sounded, he added.

Israel's Foreign Ministry condemned the attack and said it showed that Hamas was not interested in having aid enter the territory, parts of which a United Nations official says are experiencing "a full-blown famine."

The ministry said that while the army was "facilitating humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, terrorists fire rockets into the same area."

"Israel remains committed to providing lifesaving aid while Hamas remains committed to destroying lives," it added.

After the attack, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's national security minister and a far-right member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, urged Mr. Netanyahu to authorize a long-anticipated military assault on Rafah.

"We did not attack Gaza and we got Oct. 7," Mr. Ben-Gvir said in a statement posted online. "We didn't attack Rafah and we got a precision attack, Netanyahu, go to Rafah now!"

— Liam Stack reporting from Jerusalem

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The Israeli government's decision to shut down Al Jazeera's operations in that country and block its reports there was condemned by American media and free speech experts as a troubling precedent and further evidence that Israel was engaging in a harsh wartime crackdown on democratic freedoms.

The experts noted that it was rare for a democratic government like Israel's to close down a foreign news outlet. The government described its move as a national security necessity.

But invoking national security as the basis for barring a news organization from operating in a country is "incredibly vague" and "way outside the bounds of democratic norms," said Joel Simon, director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said that closing off a country to information, news and ideas from abroad has long been a hallmark of repressive governments.

"The legitimacy of any democracy turns in part on its citizens having unrestricted access to foreign media," Mr. Jaffer said.

Some free speech advocates acknowledged that the United States seems to be pulling back from its role as a champion of information freedom. Washington is moving to ban TikTok, the popular social media app with a Chinese parent company, unless it is sold to American investors.

But Israel, they said, is a different case. Shutting down Al Jazeera is the latest step in "a broad attack on press and speech freedom" by the Israeli government, said Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who writes about freedom of speech. Israel's actions, she added, are "inconsistent with a commitment to democratic values."

Carlos Martinez de la Serna, program director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement that Israel's move "sets an extremely alarming precedent for restricting international media outlets working in Israel." He called on the Israeli government to reverse course and "allow Al Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely in Israel, especially during wartime."

But there are concerns that Israel may go in the other direction. "Is Al Jazeera a test case?" asked Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. "Will Israel start going after other news outlets that are not to the government's liking?"

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A group representing families of the Israeli hostages in Gaza expressed concerns Sunday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, under pressure from hard-line members of his governing coalition, was trying to stall or even sabotage a possible deal that could lead to a cease-fire and the release of captives held by Hamas.

A major sticking point in negotiations has been Hamas's consistent demand for a commitment by Israel to end its seven-month military offensive in Gaza and to forgo a planned invasion of Rafah, Hamas's last bastion in the south of the enclave, and Israel's reluctance to declare such concessions, according to officials.

In the discussions in Cairo, which have been mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, negotiators had been trying to leave some room for ambiguity in the early stages of a three-phased deal that could satisfy both sides.

But on Saturday the Israeli government issued two statements to reporters, to be attributed to an unnamed "political official," saying that contrary to reports, Israel would not agree to end the war as part of a deal. It added that it would not allow mediators to offer Hamas guarantees about the war's end, while blaming Hamas for scuttling any possibility of a deal by sticking to its demands.

Several of the Israeli reporters who received the statements said they had come directly from the prime minister's office in an unusual breach of the government's confidentiality rules.

Nahum Barnea, a prominent political columnist, said Sunday in Yediot Ahronot, a popular Hebrew daily news outlet, that he felt that the statements were "designed to scuttle the chances of a deal."

The Hostages Families Forum, an Israeli nongovernmental group lobbying for the release of the hostages and supporting their families, said in a statement on Sunday that it was "shocked" to hear about the statements. The group called on Mr. Netanyahu to "disregard all political pressure," "to lead" and to "show courage."

Mr. Barnea said he believed that Mr. Netanyahu would be freed "of the need to decide" on a deal if Hamas, the mediators and the far-right members of his government could be persuaded that there was not one on the table.

Mr. Netanyahu on Sunday vehemently rejected the accusations, saying in a longer statement, in his own name, that Hamas was the party obstructing a deal. "Israel was, and still is, ready to pause the fighting in order to release our hostages," he said.

Though details of a potential deal are still being hashed out, Egypt has been pushing a proposal, with the broad approval of Israeli negotiators, that would begin with a six-week truce, during which 33 of the most vulnerable hostages held in Gaza would be released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

Israel would allow the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians to northern Gaza with few restrictions, officials have said, previously a major sticking point for Israel.

Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official, said on Saturday that the group's representatives had arrived in Cairo "with great positivity" regarding the latest proposal. But Hamas officials told Arabic news outlets that issues including a permanent cease-fire and full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza remained unresolved. By early Sunday there was still no indication that Hamas had accepted the deal.

— Isabel Kershner Reporting from Jerusalem

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After one of the strongest indications yet from a United Nations agency that parts of the Gaza Strip are experiencing famine, the Israeli agency that oversees the Palestinian territories pushed back, saying it had "increased its humanitarian effort to flood the Gaza Strip with food, medical equipment and equipment for tents."

In an interview with NBC's "Meet The Press," which released a portion of it late Friday, Cindy McCain, the director of the U.N.'s World Food Program, said there was a "full-blown famine" in northern Gaza. She said her assessment was "based on what we have seen and what we have experienced on the ground."

"It is horror," said Ms. McCain, the widow of Senator John McCain. "I am so hoping we can get a cease-fire and begin to feed these people, especially in the north, in a much faster fashion."

In response on Sunday, the Israeli agency, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, said in a statement that 350 aid trucks, mostly carrying food, were entering the Gaza Strip each day. About 100 of those trucks were reaching northern Gaza, the most isolated and hard-hit area of the territory. It also said April saw a "great surge" in new aid, with more than 6,000 relief trucks entering Gaza, a 28 percent increase from the previous month.

COGAT also listed several projects to improve conditions in Gaza, including opening the Israeli port of Ashdod for humanitarian aid shipments.

But aid groups say the amount of shipments arriving is far below what is needed in Gaza, where the authorities say the war with Israel has killed more than 34,000 people, left roughly two million more homeless and destroyed the territory's infrastructure and economy.

Ms. McCain, who became head of the World Food Program last year after a stint as an ambassador appointed by President Biden, is the second American official to say there is famine in Gaza. The first was Samantha Power, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who made her remarks in congressional testimony last month.

But Ms. McCain's remarks do not constitute an official declaration, which is a complex bureaucratic process that involves both a U.N. agency, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, and the government of the country where the famine is taking place.

It is unclear what local authority might have the power to do that in Gaza. Israel's goal in Gaza is overthrowing its Hamas-backed government, which was not widely recognized before the war and has lost control of most of the enclave since the fighting began.

Last month, Arif Husain, the chief economist for the World Food Program, said that the increased levels of aid reaching Gaza in recent weeks were a good start but that they were not enough to address the risk of famine.

He said the arrival of increased amounts of aid "cannot just happen for a day or a week — it has to happen every single day for the foreseeable future."

"If we can do this, then we can ease the pain, we can avert famine," he said.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

— Liam Stack reporting from Jerusalem