The MBC Group, a media conglomerate owned by the Saudi government, sparked outrage after airing a report defaming the leaders of the Axis of Resistance who were recently assassinated by Israel. The report labeled late Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, late leader of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) Ismail Haniyeh, and his successor Yahya Sinwar, as “terrorists”.
The report provoked the ire of people across North Africa and West Asia, who have been grief-stricken over the assassination of the three prominent resistance leaders by Israel in the last couple of months, the last of whom was Sinwar, who was killed in armed clashes with the Israeli Occupation Forces last week.
On October 19, hundreds of protesters stormed MBC offices in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, destroying equipment and setting fire to parts of the building. The angry protests were followed by the decision of the Iraqi Commission for Media and Communications to suspend the MBC channel in Iraq for frequently violating broadcasting regulations and attacking “martyrs” and resistance leaders.
The Iraqi government was not the only Arab government to take an action against the MBC Group. On Sunday, October 20, Algeria suspended the operations of Al Arabiya news channel, which is part of the MBC conglomerate, for reporting bias while covering the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza and Lebanon.
Consequently, the Saudi Media Regulatory Authority announced that it summoned the managers of MBC groups and initiated investigation regarding the report, emphasizing its commitment to monitoring media outlets to ensure adherence to media regulations and policies in place. In an attempt to distance the Saudi government from responsibility for the incident, the authority has alluded in its statement that what was mentioned in the report may be attributed to the journalist, who prepared the report, not to the approach of MBC group in its entirety.
On Monday, October 21, Palestinian trade union leaders, academics and activists including activists from the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement National Committee (BNC), organized a protest in front of MBC’s offices in Ramallah city in the central occupied West Bank, demanding the closure of MBC offices in Ramallah. The BNC had already issued a statement on Sunday calling for the boycott of a number of media networks, which it described as “Arabic-speaking mouthpieces of the Israeli enemy.”
The BNC pointed out in its statement that MBC’s report “was not an individual act based on a managerial or an executive mistake. It was rather an act that aligns with the complicit stance of some regional actors, who bet on normalization with the colonial apartheid regime of the Israeli occupation. These actors view the struggle of the Palestinian and Lebanese people, and the people of the Arab nation, as a factor that hinders their future plans. This has been explicitly expressed in a media performance, which is consistent with the Zionist Israeli discourse, for more than one year.”
In 2020, Israel signed a bilateral normalization agreement under the name of “Abraham Accords” with Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, under the supervision of the United States. Israel has been looking forward to including Saudi Arabia in the accords ever since, although in the meantime both countries have been reportedly engaged in “soft normalization ties”.
For its part, Hamas issued a statement condemning MBC’s report describing it as an “ethical downfall”, and demanding the media group to immediately retract and remove the report from all its platforms, and to issue a public apology. “At a time when our Palestinian people are subjected to an unprecedented genocidal war and terrorist aggression from the Zionist entity and its army for over a year, an Arabic-speaking channel called MBC presents us with a dark and inciting report against the movement and its leaders, describing Palestinian resistance actions as terrorism,” Hamas said in the statement.