RABAT (Dispatches) – When i24News opened its two offices in Rabat and Casablanca, it became the first Israeli media company to operate in Morocco.
The move has triggered widespread anger among Moroccan media workers who see it as yet another step towards normalization of relations between the Zionist regime and Morocco, part of a wider drive for rapprochement between the occupying regime and Arab countries since 2020.
The father of Franck Melloul, the French CEO of i24News, is Moroccan, while the owner of the channel, Patrick Drahi, was born in Casablanca before moving to France at the age of 15.
On 30 May, Drahi joined some 500 journalists, artists, diplomats, and businessmen from the occupied territories and Morocco at a gala evening in Rabat to launch the channel.
The channel first went live on 17 July 2013 from its headquarters in the Israeli port city of Jaffa. It provides 24-hour news coverage in French, English and Arabic. It has offices in France, the U.S. and more recently the United Arab Emirates.
The latest i24 opening came less than a month after the killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on 11 May by a Zionist soldier while covering an Israeli incursion into occupied Palestinian territories.
For many Moroccan journalists, the timing could not have been worse.
It came “at a time when the wound is still raw from the assassination in cold blood and in front of the eyes of the world of our fellow journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by the [Zionist] occupation army,” 80 Moroccan journalists said in a joint letter.
In a statement widely shared on social networks, the group said it followed “with great concern the dangerous path of normalization pursued by the Moroccan State, since December 2020, through several agreements and decisions that allow the institutions of the Zionist occupation to desecrate our country”.
Morocco was the fourth Arab nation to sign a normalization agreement with the Zionist regime in 2020, after the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan.