TEHRAN - The cabinet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the offices of Al Jazeera news channel to shut down, with armed forces raiding its premises.

The move has been widely condemned, with many critics raising fresh concerns over what little freedom of the press remains inside apartheid Israel. 

There is more than meets the eye about the measure taken by Tel Aviv, which claims the Qatari TV outlet is a mouthpiece for Hamas. The same accusation that Israeli officials leveled against South Africa when it took the occupying regime to the International Court of Justice over charges of genocide or against the largest UN agency in Gaza UNRWA. 
Critics say the punishment against Al Jazeera was made because the Qatari TV channel has been the only go-to media outlet for the English-speaking demographic for news on the disturbing developments in the Gaza Strip. 

Since October 7, the Israeli government has banned international reporters from entering Gaza. In the absence of foreign reporters inside the enclave, many in the Western world have relied on the Israeli army’s reports. 

This has allowed Tel Aviv to avoid further scrutiny from global public opinion despite all eyes and public debate being largely focused on Gaza over the past seven months. 

Pro-Israeli supporters who claim that foreign reporters are being prevented by the Israeli military from entering Gaza for their own safety are wrong. That is a decision that reporters take and have taken in all war zones around the world and in history. 

The strict media censorship in the occupied lands has turned into a debate as many argue if the Israeli regime claims it is following international law in Gaza, the occupied West Bank or occupied al-Quds (Jerusalem) then why would it be so scared of foreign media reporting on Israeli military action. 

Instead, the regime is banning the only English-speaking channel from operating from Gaza where the Israeli military is accused of war crimes as well as killing a record number of journalists who were already on the ground before October including journalists reporting for Al Jazeera. 

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also criticized the move, saying, “A free and independent media is essential to ensuring transparency and accountability. Now, even more so given tight restrictions on reporting from Gaza.” 

There is a similar pattern of media censorship in the West. 

Following Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, Britain led Europe to ban the Russian media outlet RT. 

This led the British public to switch to Western media for their news coverage on another conflict, the Ukraine war, which critics have accused Western media of being extremely one-sided on. 

Many in the West are unaware of the events that unfolded before Russia staged military action in Ukraine, such as the expansion of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance toward the Russian borders, which the Kremlin had for years warned was a national security risk and called on NATO to end its military expansion. 

Equally important, the fighting in Ukraine did not start when Russia took military action in February 2022. Rather it began in 2014 between ethnic Russians in the eastern

Donbass region and the Ukrainian army with the death toll reaching 15,000, including civilians and armed personnel, before Russia intervened. 

The security guarantees that Moscow repeatedly requested from Washington and NATO were ignored. 

The only news network that had been giving coverage to these critical issues that could have swung public opinion and put pressure on Western governments to push for a ceasefire in Ukraine was the RT news outlet, yet the West pulled the plug on the network from its airwaves and the internet. 

The same is happening with Al Jazeera. Only one narrative must be heard, yet the move may strategically backfire as more people could take to social media for news on Gaza as is evident in the student uprising that began in America and has since spread across the West. 

The bombs continue to fall in Ukraine and Russia, and to a much larger extent (considering the geographical size of the territory) in Gaza. 

The only party profiting is the Western military-industrial complex which is laughing all the way to the bank. 

The West only supports press freedom when it serves their interests.