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Al Jazeera Center for Studies: Academic Veneer Normalizing Terrorism
The Al Jazeera Media Network logo is seen on its headquarters building in Doha, Qatar, June 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Naseem Zeitoon
Is Al Jazeera using its “academic” arm, the Al Jazeera Center for Studies (AJCS), to normalize Hamas’s atrocities, while hiding behind the veneer of a purportedly rigorous research institution? From Feb. 7 to 9, an AJCS-sponsored forum in Doha, Qatar, gave pride of place to figures such as Hamas leader Khaled Meshal under the banner of academic discourse.
AJCS is one of at least a dozen parts of the Al Jazeera Media Network’s ecosystem, funded and run by the Qatari ruling family, and used as soft power tools to amplify anti-Western and pro-Islamist narratives. Established to provide research support to Al Jazeera’s news channels, AJCS also serves to integrate the network into academic spheres. Those connections allow AJCS to enjoy a patina of academic credibility to launder and legitimize the violent ideas espoused by figures like Meshal and Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
When Meshal spoke in Doha, he justified Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel by calling it legitimate “resistance.” Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2007. The US Justice Department announced terrorism and murder conspiracy charges against Meshal for his central role in the Oct. 7 atrocities in 2024.
Araghchi had a different agenda: deflecting attention away from the thousands of Iranians slaughtered by his regime in recent weeks in the deadliest massacre since the country’s 1979 revolution. Araghchi used his remarks to call “Palestine … a test of whether international law has meaning, whether human rights have universal value.” There was no pushback from the moderator about this ironic call for justice.
Past speakers at the conference include Hamas officials Osama Hamdan and Basem Naim. Hamdan was placed on the Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) list by the US Treasury after a Hamas suicide attack in Jerusalem killed 23 people and injured 130 others in 2003. Hamdan facilitated training for a key planner of the 1996 Jaffa Road bus suicide bombings that killed 45 commuters.
Naim’s Treasury designation noted that he “holds a leadership role on Hamas’s Council on International Relations.”
The Doha forum also gave voice to some of Al Jazeera’s co-opted correspondents, including Gaza-based Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Ismail Abu Omar. Besides being a reporter for Al Jazeera, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), based on documents found in Gaza, identified him as a company commander in the East Khan Younis Battalion. If true, this raises additional concerns about its reporters serving as Hamas operatives while on Al Jazeera’s payroll. Not surprisingly, the network denied the allegations.
Abu Omar filmed himself with Hamas operatives breaching Israeli kibbutzim on Oct. 7. His published accounts on Al Jazeera expressed joy at the atrocities unfolding against Israelis, telling the network that he “was filled with tears” and “experiencing the scenes that we have always heard about, live and directly.”
Abu Omar amplified Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif’s words that “everyone who has a gun should take it out, because today is the day.”
Abu Omar is a former reporter for Al-Aqsa TV, which is sanctioned by the US Treasury Department as “a television station financed and controlled by Hamas” that airs content “designed to recruit children to become Hamas suicide bombers.” When AJCS chooses its speakers, it signals what it values.
AJCS is about more than sketchy forums, of course. Its partnerships deserve scrutiny too. In May 2025, AJCS co-hosted a conference with the obscure but influential Strategic Council on Foreign Relations in Iran (SCFR). SCFR is the advisory board to the supreme leader of Iran, helping to shape the ayatollah’s policies around the world.
It should raise eyebrows that an ostensibly independent research arm of a media entity partners with a murderous office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. By partnering with the SCFR, AJCS signals solidarity with Iran’s oppressors, not its victims.
Technically, Araghchi is a diplomat. But he gave the lie to that title at the 2024 Al Jazeera Forum when, as secretary general of SCFR, he cautioned Arab nations against diplomacy with Israel and normalizing relations with the Jewish state.
At the 2024 forum, Araghchi also said nuclear weapons “have no place” in Iran’s religious doctrine but proclaimed that Iran has the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. In fact, the regime has stymied international monitoring of its enrichment, sought to expand its nuclear program, and has no civilian use for its production of 60 percent enriched uranium. But there was no refutation or questioning of Araghchi’s statement when he appeared at the Al Jazeera Forum.
In 2025, AJCS co-organized a conference with Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University in order to “deconstruct Western narratives.” Reflecting Qatar’s foreign policy, Al Jazeera’s organizers charged Western media with “justifying” Israel’s right to self-defense in the face of Hamas’s atrocities. Moreover, they attacked media outlets for “false reports” about Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women, notwithstanding the evidence to the contrary.
Arafat Madi Shoukri, a senior researcher at AJCS, organized the conference. Israel designated Shoukri as a Hamas operative for his work with the Hamas-aligned Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR).
Shoukri has been photographed with Ismail Haniyeh, an architect of the Oct. 7 massacre. He also directed the London-based Palestinian Return Center (PRC), which former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared an illegal Hamas-affiliated organization that engages in terror-affiliated activities.
That conference featured as its keynote speaker Wadah Khanfar, a former director general of Al Jazeera. According to the Palestinian outlet Raya Media Network, Khanfar was “active in the Hamas movement” and a “leader in the movement’s office in Sudan.”
In May 2024, Khanfar praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, proclaiming it “came at the ideal moment for a radical and real shift in the path of struggle and liberation.”
Mutaz al-Khatib, from Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s College of Islamic Studies, spoke at the conference on “professional ethics” in war coverage. On October 7, 2023, he posted on Facebook that “what happened was merely a rehearsal that shows that liberating Jerusalem is possible.”
Fatima Alsmadi, a researcher at the Al Jazeera Center for Studies, lectured that Israel has somehow “benefited” from Nazism in the aftermath of its extermination of European Jewry. She praised Al Qassam Brigade spokesperson Abu Obaida’s propaganda techniques that had “a specific goal to link Israel to the Nazis” and were “not arbitrary,” “done in stages,” and “well thought out.” Weaponizing Nazi imagery against Israel legitimizes Hamas terrorism and inverts historical truth.
AJCS’s Journal for Communication and Media Studies adheres to the same editorial approach as its conferences. A January 2026 journal article relies on quotes from the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), a discredited group that requires no expertise to have voting rights, as evidenced by Emperor Palpatine, the villain of the Star Wars franchise, and similar non-experts joining as members. This is important because IAGS touted a resolution it represented as “a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies” that what is happening on the ground in Gaza is genocide.
Al Jazeera and AJCS have two personas. One is radical and platforms Hamas and Islamists like the late Yusuf Qaradawi, the most influential cleric aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose show “Shariah and Life” was on the news channel for 17 years. The other is slick and partners with big tech to leverage modern technology throughout the newsroom, in the field, and online that, in turn, amplifies Islamists and Qatari foreign policy.
AJCS operates under strict Qatari media laws that prohibit criticism of the tiny Persian Gulf nation’s emir and Doha’s policies. Freedom House has rated Qatar “Not Free” for 27 years. Al Jazeera as a whole seeks to appeal to Western sensibilities by crafting a public-facing image of an independent institution that it says “aims to present a balanced understanding” of the Middle East and the Arab world. AJCS has not lived up to any standard of scholarship.
The glitz of Al Jazeera’s flashy conference and global reach should not distract from the perils of treating the Al Jazeera ecosystem like a neutral entity, untethered to a foreign authoritarian state’s policies.
US government agencies should investigate whether Al Jazeera or its center, or others on its behalf, have paid any expenses or provided material support associated with Hamas officials’ participation in any of its programming. If investigators discover such connections, appropriate sanctions, fines, or other measures should be taken.
Likewise, the US Department of Education should assess whether any American educational institutions have partnerships with AJCS.
Congress and the Justice Department should assess if the center’s actions should be disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Justice Department has already determined that other parts of AJMN must register as Qatari foreign agents.
Until Doha stops using any part of the Al Jazeera Media Network to whitewash terrorism, American institutions and companies need to reconsider their relationship with all platforms in its vast ecosystem. Continued collaboration from Western organizations only emboldens the next denials and justifications for violence.
Toby Dershowitz is a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), on whose website this article first appeared. Eitan Fischberger is an independent OSINT investigator. Follow Toby on X @tobydersh. Follow Eitan on X @EFischberger. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
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Doctors Without Borders Admits Gaza Hospital Used by Militants, Halts Operations
People walk at the site of Israeli strikes on Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip in this still image taken from video, Aug. 25, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled
The international humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders has publicly acknowledged that armed individuals — many of them masked — were present inside the large compound of Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, citing intimidation of patients, arbitrary arrests, and suspected weapons movement as reasons for halting some of its work there.
The admission, buried in a rarely referenced FAQ page on the group’s website published last month, lends factual support to claims long asserted by Israeli authorities about the use of medical facilities by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists during the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which is French for Doctors Without Borders, said it has suspended all “non-critical medical operations” at Nasser Hospital as of Jan. 20, 2026, citing “concerns regarding the management of the structure, the safeguarding of its neutrality, and security breaches.”
MSF’s admission was first reported by independent analyst Salo Aizenberg.
In describing those “security breaches,” MSF stated that patients and its own personnel observed “armed men, some masked, in different areas of the large hospital compound … not in areas where MSF has activities.” It added that since the most recent ceasefire in Gaza, teams have reported a “pattern of unacceptable acts,” including the presence of armed men, intimidation, arbitrary arrests of patients, and “a recent situation of suspicion of movement of weapons.” The group said such conditions posed “serious security threats to our teams and patients.”
The hospital in Khan Younis — one of Gaza’s largest and, until recently, few functioning referral centers in the densely populated territory — has been a flashpoint in the Israel-Hamas war since early 2024. After intense battles and an Israeli military operation that searched for hostages inside the complex, the hospital was rendered non-functional and later reopened.
For months, the Israeli government and military have claimed that Hamas and other armed groups used hospitals — including Nasser — as shelter and operational bases, allegations that Palestinian authorities and many humanitarian organizations have rejected. In February 2024, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Spokesman Daniel Hagari said the military had “credible intelligence” that Hamas held Israeli hostages at Nasser Hospital at one point and that there may have been bodies of hostages currently hidden there.
The Algemeiner has previously documented claims acknowledged by the Palestinian Authority that Hamas summoned Gazans to the Nasser compound for interrogations and that militants threatened hospital staff.
Terrorists from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an allied group in Gaza, have confessed that they took over hospitals across the enclave, using the medical facilities to hide military activities, launch attacks, and hold hostages kidnapped during their Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
In the FAQ disclosure, MSF did not explicitly identify the armed men or link them to specific groups. But by reporting the presence of masked fighters, intimidation of civilians, and suspicion of weapons movement within the hospital compound, MSF’s account aligns with Israeli officials’ long-standing narrative that medical facilities have not been strictly neutral zones.
MSF said it formally expressed concern to “relevant authorities” and stressed that hospitals “must remain neutral, civilian spaces, free from military presence or activity” to ensure the safe delivery of care.
The new disclosure comes amid broader tensions between MSF and the Israeli government over registration and operations in Gaza, including Israel’s decision to bar dozens of aid groups, including MSF, from registering to operate in the territory after March 2026.
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Ireland Confirms It Will Face Israel in Nations League After Calling for Ban From UEFA
Soccer Football – UEFA Nations League Draw – Brussels Expo, Brussels, Belgium – Feb. 12, 2026, General view during the draw. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Ireland has agreed to play against Israel this fall in the UEFA Nations League mere months after pushing for the Jewish state to be banned from international soccer competitions because of its war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
The UEFA announced on Thursday in Brussels all the matchups for the 2026-27 Nations League, and Ireland was drawn to go head-to-head against Israel, as well as Austria and Kosovo, in Group B3. Ireland is set to play its away game against the Jewish state on Sept. 27 and will then host Israel in Dublin on Oct. 4.
The Israel Football Association said it hopes to host the Sept. 27 match in Israel, but a formal decision will reportedly be made in June. Israel has not hosted UEFA matches since October 2023 because of the war in Gaza with Hamas.
After the fixtures were announced on Thursday, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) confirmed in a released statement that the Irish men’s national team will indeed compete against Israel in both matches because they risk “potential disqualification” if they do not. The statement also addressed the motion the FAI approved in November 2025 to have Israel banned from UEFA competitions because of the country’s war in Gaza. The motions were ultimately rejected.
“In 2025, a motion was proposed by members of the FAI General Assembly to vote on issuing a formal request to the UEFA executive committee for the immediate suspension of the Israel Football Association from UEFA competitions for a breach of UEFA statutes,” the FAI said. “Members then voted in favor to submit the motion to UEFA, which the association did in November 2025. While consultation has taken place with UEFA officials, the association does recognize that UEFA regulations outline that if an association refuses to play a match then that fixture will be forfeited and further disciplinary measures may follow — including potential disqualification from the competition.”
FIFA President Gianni Infantino previously announced that no action will be taken against Israel and that FIFA “should actually never ban any country” from playing soccer “because of the acts of their political leaders.”
In October 2025, Republic of Ireland manager Heimir Hallgrimsson called on Israel to be banned from international competition just like Russia was after its invasion of Ukraine. “I don’t see a difference between FIFA and UEFA banning Russia and not Israel. I don’t see the difference,” Hallgrimssson said at the time. “I am not speaking on behalf of the FAI – I just don’t see the difference.”
He said on Thursday he stands by those comments and will respect any player’s decision not to compete against Israel in the Nations League.
“It’s obviously every player’s decision to play for the national team or not. So, it’s going to be whatever reason that is. It’s every player’s decision if they want to play for the national team or not,” he said, as quoted by the Irish Mirror. “But it’s not my decision if you play or not against them or what decision is taken on a higher level. I am the head coach. I need to focus on the football thing. I hope when we play them, the supporters will support Ireland and support us to do good when we play against them.”
Joanna Byrne, chairperson of Ireland’s soccer club Drogheda United, criticized the FAI for agreeing to play against Israel in the Nations League.
“In November, the FAI voted to submit a motion to UEFA to ban Israel from its European club and international competitions. That was the correct moral and principled position to take,” she said, as reported by the Irish Mirror. “Therefore, I am extremely angry and dismayed that the FAI have confirmed they will play against Israel.”
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Trump Tells Soldiers ‘Fear’ Is Powerful Motivator in Iran Talks as US Moves Second Carrier to Middle East
US President Donald Trump speaks during a visit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, US, Feb. 13, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
President Donald Trump told US troops on Friday that Iran has been “difficult” in nuclear negotiations and suggested that instilling fear in Tehran may be necessary to resolve the standoff peacefully.
“They’ve been difficult to make a deal,” Trump said of the Iranians before an audience of active-duty soldiers at Fort Bragg Army base in North Carolina after US officials said they were sending a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East.
“Sometimes you have to have fear. That’s the only thing that really will get the situation taken care of.”
During his address Trump also referenced the US bombing of Iran‘s nuclear sites last June.
Earlier, he said the deployment of the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, the United States’ newest and the world’s largest, was being made so “we’ll have it ready” should negotiations with Iran fail.
Oman facilitated talks between Iran and the US last week, which a spokesperson for Iran‘s foreign ministry said had allowed Tehran to gauge Washington’s seriousness and showed enough consensus for diplomacy to continue. The date and venue of the next round of US-Iran talks have yet to be announced.
The president traveled to Fort Bragg to meet special forces troops involved in the audacious Jan. 3 operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Maduro, who faces narco-terrorism and drug trafficking charges in US court, denies wrongdoing and maintains he is the rightful leader of Venezuela. In the weeks since the Venezuelan leader’s capture, Trump has worked with Maduro’s interim successor Delcy Rodriguez and sought broad control over the country’s oil industry.
Fort Bragg is home to some 50,000 active-duty soldiers. It also sits in one of the country’s more competitive political states.
Trump’s comments came as the Pentagon moved to send an aircraft carrier from the Caribbean to the Middle East, US officials said on Friday, a move that will put two carriers in the region as tensions soar between the United States and Iran.
The Gerald R. Ford carrier has been operating in the Caribbean with its escort ships and took part in the operations in Venezuela earlier this year.
Asked why a second aircraft carrier was headed to the Middle East, Trump said: “In case we don’t make a deal, we’ll need it … if we need it, we’ll have it ready.”
One of the officials, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, said the carrier would take at least a week to reach the Middle East.
The Gerald R. Ford will join the Abraham Lincoln carrier, several guided-missile destroyers, fighter jets, and surveillance aircraft that have been moved to the Middle East in recent weeks.
The United States most recently had two aircraft carriers in the area last year, when it carried out strikes against Iranian nuclear sites in June.
With only 11 aircraft carriers in the US military’s arsenal, they are a scarce resource and their schedules are usually set well in advance.
In a statement, US Southern Command, which oversees US military operations in Latin America, said it would continue to stay focused on countering “illicit activities and malign actors in the Western Hemisphere.”
Trump had said this week he was considering sending a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East if a deal is not reached with Iran.
On Friday he told reporters he thought that talks with Iran would be successful but warned that “if they’re not, it’s going to be a bad day for Iran.”
The Ford has essentially been at sea since June 2025. It was supposed to be operating in Europe before it was abruptly moved to the Caribbean in November.
While deployments for carriers usually last nine months, it is not uncommon for them to be extended during periods of increased US military activity.
Navy officials have long warned that long deployments at sea can damage morale on ships.
Officials said the administration had looked at sending a separate carrier, the Bush, to the Middle East, but it was undergoing certification and would take over a month to reach the Middle East.
The Ford, which has a nuclear reactor on board, can hold more than 75 military aircraft, including fighter aircraft like the F-18 Super Hornet jets and the E-2 Hawkeye, which can act as an early warning system.
The Ford also includes sophisticated radar that can help control air traffic and navigation.
The supporting ships, such as the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser Normandy, Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers Thomas Hudner, Ramage, Carney, and Roosevelt, include surface-to-air, surface-to-surface and anti-submarine warfare capabilities.