Middle East Eye

• 1. Introduction

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  Middle East Eye counted Jamal Khashoggi among its contributors, before he became a Washington Post columnist. He was assassinated after entering the Saudi consulate in Turkey on the 2nd of October 2018. The outlet reports on the Middle East, North Africa, and the wider Muslim world from London. Behind that single death sit bigger open questions. Who actually owns and pays for Middle East Eye? Why have the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain, and Jordan each moved against the outlet at different points? And why does its own editor-in-chief refuse to name the person he insists is really in charge?

• 2. Ownership And Origins

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  Jamal Bessasso is the sole director of M.E.E. Limited, the company formally listed as owner of Middle East Eye. The outlet launched in London in April 2014. Bessasso is a Kuwait-born Palestinian living in London who lists his nationality as Dutch at Companies House. He owns more than 75% of the shares and voting rights and can appoint or remove directors. For a few weeks in 2018, he also served as the company's secretary. Bessasso previously worked as a director of Al-Quds TV, a station controlled by Hamas. Al-Quds TV halted its operations in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in 2019, due to financial difficulties.

  David Hearst serves as editor-in-chief and previously worked as a foreign lead writer for The Guardian. By 2017, Middle East Eye employed about 20 full-time staff in London. Hearst has denied that Bessasso is the owner of the news site. He has refused to say who the real owner actually is.

  In 2013, according to critics, Middle East Eye began forming in London, a year before its official launch. Several journalists from Al Jazeera joined the project soon after. Jonathan Powell, a senior Al Jazeera executive, worked as a consultant before the launch and registered the website's domain names.

  Three years after that launch, foreign governments would move to demand the company's closure entirely.

• 3. The Khashoggi Byline

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  According to a post on the Middle East Eye website, Jamal Khashoggi wrote for the outlet over a period of two years. His op-eds were not credited to him at the time, due to concerns for his safety. Many of his articles were critical of Saudi Arabia's policies and of the kingdom's rift with Qatar.

  Saudi Arabia initially denied any involvement in Khashoggi's death. The kingdom later said he had been killed by rogue assassins inside the consulate building. Officials described the killing as carried out with what they called 'premeditated intention.'

  The rift between Saudi Arabia and Qatar in Khashoggi's own writing was about to become the subject of accusations against the outlet itself.

• 4. Accusations And Demands

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  Governments in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain have repeatedly accused Middle East Eye of being covertly funded by Qatar. In 2017, the outlet denied taking any Qatari money. It described the funding demand as an attempt to 'extinguish any free voice which dares to question what they are doing.'

  The outlet's editor-in-chief said MEE 'covers the area without fear or favour.' He pointed to its reporting on how workers from the subcontinent were treated on 2022 World Cup building projects in Qatar. He called that coverage critical of the Qatari authorities.

  On the 22nd of June 2017, during the Qatar diplomatic crisis, four countries issued a list of 13 demands to Qatar. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain demanded that Qatar close Middle East Eye. They viewed it as sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and as a Qatari-funded, aligned outlet.

  That same diplomatic crisis would soon spill into a separate scandal involving leaked emails from a Gulf ambassador in Washington.

• 5. Leaks And A Libel Case

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  In early June 2017, an anonymous hacker group began sending stolen emails to multiple news outlets. The emails came from the inbox of Yousef Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador in Washington, D.C. They included details from leaked messages involving Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and American officials. On the 14th of August 2017, Middle East Eye's reporting on the leak led other outlets to print further material from the same cache. According to The New York Times, the hacked emails appeared to benefit Qatar. They were believed to be the work of hackers connected to Qatar, a frequent subject of the correspondence.

  On the 29th of July 2016, Middle East Eye published a story about the 2016 Turkish coup attempt two weeks earlier. It alleged that the United Arab Emirates had funnelled large sums of money to the conspirators. Palestinian exile Mohammed Dahlan was named as having aided the effort. In 2017, Dahlan sued the outlet for libel in a London court, seeking damages of up to £250,000. He dropped the claim against Middle East Eye and editor David Hearst in 2018, ending the case.

  Dahlan maintained that the story was 'fully fabricated'. He said he had 'achieved his goals in the English courts' and planned to sue Facebook in Dublin, where the article was 'widely published'. According to Middle East Eye and its lawyers, dropping the claim meant Dahlan would pay legal costs for both sides. Those costs were estimated at more than £500,000.

  In November 2019, the Turkish government officially accused Dahlan of involvement in the 2016 coup attempt. It offered $700,000 for information leading to his capture.

  Legal disputes were not the only threat facing Middle East Eye. State-linked hackers would soon try a different method of attack.

• 6. Attacks And Bans

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  In April 2020, Middle East Eye was one of 20 websites targeted by hackers using a watering hole attack. That method serves malicious code to certain visitors and can let attackers compromise their computers. Cybersecurity researchers at ESET linked the campaign to an Israeli surveillance company called Candiru.

  The United Arab Emirates blocked Middle East Eye's website nationwide on the 29th of June 2016, according to human rights monitors. The block followed MEE reports on the UAE's role in the Yemen war and on human rights issues there. Middle East Eye says it contacted the UAE embassy in London for an explanation but received no response.

  Egypt blocked the website following protests against President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in September and October 2019. In May 2025, Jordan's Media Commission blocked Middle East Eye, along with other outlets, after it published an investigation into fees charged to NGOs. The investigation alleged that Jordan's armed forces charged NGOs very high fees to send humanitarian aid into Gaza. Press freedom groups, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, condemned the bans as threats to independent journalism.

  By 2022, scrutiny of the outlet would shift away from government pressure and toward the conduct of one of its own contributors.

• 7. Reach And A Reckoning

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  Middle East Eye reports on events in 22 countries, according to its own website, with content split into news, opinion, and essay categories. Since the outlet's founding, it has broken exclusives on major Middle East events that other media organizations have picked up worldwide. Since January 2019, some of its articles have been translated into Japanese and distributed by AFPBB, the Japanese arm of Agence France-Presse.

  In October 2022, Middle East Eye faced scrutiny over one of its own journalists. Shatha Hammad, a Palestinian Arab journalist associated with the outlet, had made antisemitic remarks on social media in 2014, including praising Adolf Hitler. Middle East Eye terminated its association with Hammad following the revelations.

  That October 2022 termination stands as the outlet's most recent publicly acknowledged staffing controversy to date.