Al-Masirah

The President of the board of Al-Masirah is Mohammed Abdulsalam who is also Houthis official spokesman and their chief negotiator.^[5]

Al-Masirah was founded by the Houthi movement in January 2012 in Beirut, Lebanon and is located next to Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV with backup studios at Hezbollah headquarters.^[3] The channel launched its first test broadcast on 23 March 2012, on the Nilesat satellite.^[6]

On 10 May 2015, Al-Masirah, along with other anti-Saudi channels, were closed on Nile Sat & Euro Sat^[7] due to Saudi pressure on the satellite companies, which made Al-Masirah broadcast its signal instead on the Russian satellite Express AM44.^[8] After several months of being banned on Nile Sat, broadcast is now online on Nile Sat.

After the Houthi takeover in Yemen, Al-Masirah lost a number of employees due to conflict.

• On 4 January 2015, Al-Masirah Journalist Khaled al-Washli was killed by an exploding bomb as he covered attempts to defuse it.^[9][10][11]
• On 17 September 2015, Bilal Sharaf al-Deen was covering an airstrike, when he was killed by a following airstrike.^[12]
• On 21 January 2016, 17-year-old TV cameraman Hashem al-Hamran was mortally injured by an air-strike by the Saudi-led coalition in the city of Dahian in Saada Governorate, when he was filming bombing raids for al-Masirah. He died from his wounds on 22 January 2016.^[13][14] The YJS, the IFJ and Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO, condemned the killing of Hashem Al Hamran.^[14][15]

On June 22, 2021, United States law enforcement agencies seized a number of domains associated with Al-Masirah.^[16]

• Television in Yemen
• List of journalists killed in Yemen