Al Jazeera

Overview

In September 2026, Al Jazeera is the news story. On September 25, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly and singled the network out as one of the world’s “toxic media outlets,” accusing it of trying to “brainwash young minds to hate Israel” (Al Jazeera). Al Jazeera answered that it “categorically rejects” the attack as part of Israel’s “sustained campaign” against it and its journalists — and pointed to the toll behind its objection: more than 270 journalists have been killed in Gaza, at least 12 of them reporting for Al Jazeera, and some of its journalists were subjected to campaigns of incitement and vilification before being targeted (Al Jazeera).

The network is under fire from more directions than one. Six days before the UN speech, it fired 24 journalists and staff members who worked for it in the Gaza Strip — this amid a lawsuit filed in the United States in February 2025 by the NGO and civil rights group Shurat HaDin, with support from the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs, accusing the Qatari broadcaster of providing support to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and naming the employees (The Jerusalem Post). The network had already lost its place in Israel itself: “two years ago,” its cabinet voted to shut down Al Jazeera in the country, ordering the closure of its offices and a ban on its broadcasts, after the Knesset passed a law allowing the temporary closure of foreign outlets deemed a “threat to security” (Al Jazeera).

This is Al Jazeera in 2026: the largest Arabic-language news network in the world, built from the wreckage of a BBC venture, sustained by Qatari government money, denounced by an Israeli prime minister from the UN podium, and simultaneously defending its own staff from a terror-support lawsuit in an American court (Al Jazeera; Al Jazeera).

Born from the BBC’s broken venture

Al Jazeera exists because of a censorship fight it had nothing to do with. In April 1996, the BBC World Service’s Arabic television station — a joint venture with a Saudi company — was shut down after the Saudi government tried to censor a documentary, throwing 250 journalists out of work (Fast Company). The Emir of Qatar, sitting on some of the world’s largest natural-gas reserves, liked the defunct BBC Arabic and put up $150 million to build a replacement in Doha; large numbers of the BBC’s people moved from London to Qatar to run it (Fast Company).

When it launched on Friday, November 1, 1996, it was, in its own words, the first independent news channel in the Arab world — a region whose media had been dominated by state-controlled narratives (Al Jazeera). Its founding tagline, “The Opinion and the Other Opinion,” was a promise to bring multiple angles to stories the rest of Arab media would not touch (Al Jazeera). Today the network says it operates more than 70 bureaus worldwide, employs more than 3,000 people from more than 95 countries, and is available in over 150 countries and territories in more than 430 million homes — while describing itself as “an independent news organisation funded in part by the Qatari government” (Al Jazeera).

The first decade: scoops, bombs, and boycotts

The channel made its name covering events Arab viewers cared about in ways they had never seen: graphic footage from inside Iraq during Operation Desert Fox in 1998 put it on the map, and its coverage of the Palestinian Al Aqsa Intifada in 2000 inflamed the Arab world — and its critics (Fast Company). Its offices then became targets in the post-9/11 wars. In 2001, two American “smart” bombs destroyed its Kabul office during the Afghan war; the U.S. government called it a mistake (Fast Company). In April 2003, U.S. forces bombed its Baghdad headquarters, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub; Washington again called it a mistake (Fast Company). A year later, incensed at reports from Fallujah, George W. Bush reportedly asked Tony Blair whether he should bomb the station’s headquarters in Qatar (Fast Company).

Governments that could not bomb it boycotted it instead. Bahrain banned its reporters in May 2002; the Gulf Cooperation Council called for an advertising boycott that October; and in February 2003 the Saudis launched Al Arabiya as a more pro-American competitor (Fast Company). There were also scandals it could not wave away: in September 2005, correspondent Tayssir Allouni was sentenced to seven years in a Spanish prison for carrying money for Al Qaeda (Fast Company).

English, America, and the attempted shutdown

Al Jazeera looked west in the 2000s. In August 2004, Nigel Parsons was named managing director of a new English-language news channel, Al Jazeera International, which launched in 2006 and eventually became Al Jazeera English (Fast Company; Reuters). By 2016 the English channel reached more than 305 million households in over 160 countries (Reuters). Its American gamble, Al Jazeera America — launched in 2013 after the network bought Current TV from Al Gore and his partners — shut down on April 30, 2016, with the company citing the “economic challenges” of the U.S. media market (Reuters).

The gravest threat to the network’s existence did not come from a competitor but from a government. In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates handed Qatar a 13-point ultimatum via Kuwaiti mediators: among the top demands, Qatar had to shut down Al Jazeera and its affiliates, with 10 days to comply (NPR). The UN’s Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye, said the demand “represents a serious threat to media freedom,” and Qatar’s foreign minister declared the network an “internal affair” that would not be discussed during the crisis (Al Jazeera). Doha never complied; the blockade ended in early 2021 without a single demand being implemented, the network intact (Al Jazeera).

The Gaza war: its deadliest beat

No chapter of the network’s history has been costlier than its Gaza coverage. On May 11, 2022, Shireen Abu Akleh — a Palestinian-American journalist who had reported for Al Jazeera for 25 years and was a household name across the Arab world — was shot dead while covering an Israeli raid in Jenin, wearing a blue vest and helmet clearly marked “PRESS” (Arab News). The UN Security Council condemned the killing and called for an “immediate, thorough, transparent, and fair and impartial investigation”; when Israeli riot police pushed and beat her pallbearers, briefly dropping her casket, the funeral became one of the largest displays of Palestinian nationalism in Jerusalem in a generation (Arab News). Israel initially suggested she might have been shot by Palestinian gunmen, then backtracked (Arab News).

Since October 2023, the war in Gaza has been the deadliest conflict for journalists ever documented. The Committee to Protect Journalists has called it exactly that: more press members were killed in Gaza in two years than were killed worldwide in the prior three years, and Israel has not allowed foreign journalists to enter the territory independently since the war began (The Jerusalem Post). Al Jazeera puts the total at more than 270 journalists killed, at least 12 of them reporting for the network (Al Jazeera). But the network’s own credibility has taken hits: on June 25, the CPJ removed 20 names from its database of killed journalists after confirming that those individuals had worked for Hamas or PIJ, and it has said it is conducting a full review of every name on its lists (The Jerusalem Post). The CPJ’s CEO added that the organization condemns “in no uncertain terms the misrepresentation of combatants as journalists or media workers, or the misuse of ‘Press’ insignia” (The Jerusalem Post).

That is the tension that defines Al Jazeera in 2026: a network whose correspondents have died in record numbers doing journalism its editors call fact-finding, while facing, in an American court, the allegation that some of its own Gaza staff were something else entirely — allegations that are unproven and that the network has not accepted, but that it answered by firing 24 of the people they touched (The Jerusalem Post).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state the exact size of Qatar’s funding for Al Jazeera, since no fully-read source confirmed a figure. It does not treat the allegations in the February 2025 U.S. lawsuit as findings — they are reported here as alleged, and the case was pending at the time of the reporting. It does not assert the precise date of Israel’s cabinet vote to close the network, which is dated in this profile only as “two years ago” per the network’s September 2026 statement. It takes no position on competing accusations of bias against the network; it reports who made which claim.