The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had targeted an Al Jazeera journalist in a strike on Gaza City, accusing him of being a Hamas operative and a “military terrorist.”

Al Jazeera said the strike killed five of its journalists and denied Israeli claims that its reporters have ties to Hamas. It accused Israel of attempting to silence reporters before a planned offensive to take over Gaza City, which Israel announced on Friday.

The network has said that Israel has fabricated evidence to support its accusations, and the attack on Sunday inflamed long-running tensions between the Israeli government and the Qatari network. Al Jazeera has faced similar criticism — and bans — from other Middle Eastern countries.

Here is what to know about the broadcaster.

Why is Al Jazeera criticized?

Al Jazeera was founded in 1996 with funding from the government of Qatar and a mission to produce independent news, free of any influence, in Arabic. While it is a private business, it continues to receive financial support from the Qatari government.

“Media in the Arab world, till then, was characterized by state-controlled narratives that denied audiences the right to know and the right to be heard,” Al Jazeera says of the impetus for its creation.

The network, which says it has 70 bureaus worldwide and more than 3,000 employees, was the first regional broadcaster to give airtime to Israeli officials and analysts, but it has also come under criticism from Israeli officials and the Palestinian Authority, which administers part of the West Bank. Both governments accusing Al Jazeera of supporting Hamas.

Critics of the network throughout the region say it amplifies the voices of militant groups in the Middle East. The network says its critics are trying to suppress its reporters’ independent coverage.

Why has Israel banned the network?

Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have long accused Al Jazeera of being the “mouthpiece of Hamas.” They banned the network’s operations in Israel last year, accusing the broadcaster of harming Israel’s security and inciting violence against its soldiers.

The Israeli military last year accused six Al Jazeera journalists — including Anas al-Sharif whom Israel said it had targeted in its attack on Gaza City on Sunday — of being fighters with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group. The military has showed documents purporting to prove those ties, which The New York Times has not independently verified.

Al Jazeera denied the accusations, which it said were based on “fabricated evidence.”

The Israeli military in 2024 killed Ismail al-Ghoul, an Al Jazeera reporter in Gaza, claiming he was a member of Hamas’s military wing, along with a cameraman, Rami al-Rifee, who was not accused of involvement with the militant group. Al Jazeera called the accusation “baseless.”

Israel has banned all foreign journalists from independently entering Gaza to cover the war since the conflict was ignited by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. As a result, Al Jazeera’s Palestinian correspondents in Gaza have provided much of the on-the-ground coverage of the conflict, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and led to mass privation and hunger in the enclave.

Trouble between the broadcaster and Israel began before the war in Gaza. In 2022, relations eroded after one of the network’s reporters, the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed in the occupied West Bank. A New York Times investigation found that the bullet that killed her had been fired from the approximate location of an Israeli military convoy.

Why did the Palestinian Authority ban Al Jazeera?

The Palestinian Authority banned Al Jazeera in the West Bank in January, accusing it of “inciting sedition” and “interfering in internal Palestinian affairs.”

The ban, which Palestinian officials had said would last until Al Jazeera “corrected its legal status,” without detailing the accusations, was lifted in May.

Experts who track the network say its coverage and commentary echo many of Hamas’s claims and increases support for its actions, especially on its Arabic-language channel. It also broadcasts in English, among other languages.

“The fact that it just gives the primary platform to Hamas, Hamas officials, Hamas spokesmen, et cetera, the fact that it cuts off any voices that are critical of Hamas — it has basically made it such that on Al Jazeera, Hamas is really the spokesman for the Palestinian people,” Ghaith al-Omari, a Palestinian affairs analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former adviser to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, told The Times last year.

Where else has Al Jazeera run into trouble?

Among other difficulties for the network, in 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain all banned Al Jazeera amid a diplomatic spat with Qatar. Along with Egypt, the countries had accused Al Jazeera of backing terror groups.

Qatar hosts the political office of Hamas and has contributed significant financial aid to Gaza over the years, with the knowledge and support of the Israeli government. The country has also served as a mediator for Hamas in negotiations with governments that do not deal directly with the Palestinian armed group, like Israel and the United States.

Cairo had long accused Qatar of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood — a Sunni Islamist movement founded in 1928 in Egypt to counter Western and colonialist influence — which was ousted from power in Egypt in 2013 when the military removedthe country’s elected president Mohamed Morsi, one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s members. That same year, Al Jazeera’s local affiliate in Egypt was shut down by court order. Al Jazeera denied supporting the Brotherhood.