Israel blocks Al-Jazeera following decision to suspend its services

On 5th May 2024, Israel’s cabinet voted to shut down Al-Jazeera’s services in the country. Since 5th May 2024 OONI data suggests that Al-Jazeera websites (www.aljazeera.com,www.aljazeera.net) are inaccessible on several networks in Israel.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of www.aljazeera.com and www.aljazeera.net in Israel between 4th April 2024 to 4th July 2024.

As is evident, both domains presented a spike in anomalies (signs of censorship) on 5th May 2024, the day the decision to suspend Al-Jazeera’s services was approved by the cabinet. Both Al-Jazeera’s domains were previously found accessible, only starting to present a spike in anomalies on the day the decision was published. This comparison (with past measurements) provides a signal of censorship. Moreover, the vast majority of measurements collected from the testing of Al-Jazeera domains from 5th May 2024 to the date of the publication present anomalies. The persistent and ongoing presence of anomalies further suggests that these domains were inaccessible on tested networks.

Most anomalous measurements present signs of DNS based tampering because the DNS queries from the local vantage points failed in an unexpected way (resulting in DNS cache errors), but resolved to the correct IPs from the control vantage point. Meanwhile, throughout this period, some measurements were successful, suggesting that access to Al-Jazeera is not blocked on all networks in Israel. The strongest signs of blocking are visible on AS12849, AS1680, and AS6810, which received the largest overall measurement coverage and the largest volume of anomalies between 5th May 2024 to 4th July 2024.

If you are in Israel, you can contribute more measurements by running OONI Probe.