Israel designates Hamas-linked TV station a terrorist organization

Israel placed a Palestinian TV station called the al-Quds Channel on a terror blacklist on Monday due to its role as a propaganda tool for Hamas.

By: World Israel News Staff

On Monday, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman officially designated a Palestinian television network called the al-Quds Channel as a terrorist organization.

Specifically, Liberman maintained that the station is actually a Hamas appendage used to spread propaganda from its Lebanon headquarters.

“According to up-to-date, reliable, cross-checked and diverse intelligence, the al-Quds station is a propaganda wing of Hamas, representing a central platform for distributing the terrorist organization’s messages,” the defense minister’s office announced in a statement.

Hamas responded by calling the station’s blacklisting an act of “terror,” with Arab members of the Knesset condemning Israel for supposedly limiting freedom of speech.

Liberman’s office communicated that the Shin Bet security service initiated the terrorist designation.

Meanwhile, Israel-based al-Quds Channel reporters and cameramen, in addition to employees of an affiliated production company, were questioned by Israeli police on Monday and ordered to cease operations, reported Haaretz.

The al-Quds Channel joins a list of other media outlets shut down by the Israeli military in the past few years based on incitement to violence and links to terror groups.

The Hamas terror group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) regularly glorify terrorists and their heinous crimes against Israelis. Numerous schools, squares, and streets are also named after the perpetrators of these crimes.

PA law also requires lifetime salaries to terrorists in prison and families of those killed while committing their crimes, a practice that Israel has sought to end with a new law garnishing PA tax funds to offset the hundreds of millions of dollars paid annually by the PA as terror stipends.