Israeli soldiers raid, order closure of Al Jazeera office in Ramallah

Israeli soldiers have raided Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank and ordered the Doha-based news network to shut down operations amid a widening Israeli crackdown on media freedom.

Heavily armed and masked Israeli soldiers forcefully entered the building housing Al Jazeera’s bureau and handed the 45-day closure order to the network’s West Bank bureau chief, Walid al-Omari, early on Sunday.

Al-Omari said the Israeli military’s closure order accused the network of “incitement to and support of terrorism”.

Al Jazeera’s Jivara Budeiri said Israeli forces used tear gas in the vicinity of the Al Jazeera bureau and al-Manara Square in the heart of the occupied West Bank city. She added that Israeli soldiers confiscated their cameras. Budeiri said she feared the military might try to destroy Al Jazeera’s archives, which are stored in the office.

Israeli military vehicles left Ramallah after the raid.

Speaking over the phone from Ramallah, Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim said the West Bank raid and the closure order come “as no surprise” after the earlier ban on reporting from inside Israel.

“We’ve heard Israeli officials threatening to close down the bureau. We’ve heard the government discussing this, asking the military ruler in the occupied West Bank to close down and shut down the channel. But we [had] not been expecting it to happen today,” Ibrahim said.

‘To erase the truth’

Sunday’s raid comes just months after the Israeli government banned Al Jazeera from operating inside Israel in May in the wake of its devastating war in Gaza, which has been turned into ruins by nonstop bombardment for the past 11 months.

That initial closure order was also for 45 days, but it was renewed and Al Jazeera journalists are still unable to report from inside the country.

After the raid, bureau chief al-Omari raised concerns about what Israeli soldiers may do to the office.

“Targeting journalists this way always aims to erase the truth and prevent people from hearing the truth,” he said.

The Government Media Office in Gaza called the Israeli move a “deafening scandal”.

“We call on all media organisations and groups that deal with human rights in the world to condemn this heinous crime … that is a blatant violation of press and media freedom,” it said.

Mostafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, said Israel has no right, legally speaking, to close any office in Ramallah, which falls in Area A under the security and civil administration of the Palestinian Authority (PA). He added that Al Jazeera’s operating license was issued by the PA.

“This is the real face of Israel, a country that claims to be a democracy and claims to be supporting freedom of press,” he said.

Izzat al-Risheq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, described the closure order as “a retaliatory measure against its professional role in exposing the occupation’s crimes against our people”.

He said, “The closure of Al Jazeera’s office is the culmination of the declared war against journalists who are subjected to systematic Zionist terrorism aimed at hiding the truth.”

Killing and silencing journalists

Media rights groups have slammed the Israeli government for its restrictions and attacks on journalists, particularly Palestinian reporters on the ground in Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing war on the besieged enclave.

Since the start of the war in October last year, Israeli forces have killed 173 journalists, according to a tally from the Government Media Office. International journalists have not been allowed to report independently from Gaza.

Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul and Samer Abudaqa are among the journalists killed.

Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Ismail Abu Omar was also severely injured in an Israeli strike in February.

Attacks against Al Jazeera reporters predate the war in Gaza, however.

In 2022, Israeli forces killed veteran Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh while she was reporting from Jenin in the occupied West Bank.

A year earlier, the Israeli military also bombed a tower housing the network’s offices in Gaza.

Al Jazeera condemned the ban on reporting inside Israel earlier this year, calling it a “criminal act that violates human rights and the basic right to access of information”.

“Israel’s ongoing suppression of the free press, seen as an effort to conceal its actions in the Gaza Strip, stands in contravention of international and humanitarian law,” the network said in a statement in May.

“Israel’s direct targeting and killing of journalists, arrests, intimidation and threats will not deter Al Jazeera from its commitment to cover.”

Sunday’s raid highlights Israel’s tight control over the occupied West Bank, including areas purported to be under PA jurisdiction, such as Ramallah.

It comes two days after the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for an end to the Israeli occupation.

Rami Khouri, a fellow at the American University of Beirut, also said the raid is part of a longstanding Israeli policy of seeking to “prevent real news about Palestinians or about what the State of Israel is doing to Palestinians” from coming out.

But Khouri told Al Jazeera that the bureau’s closure won’t “stop the world from knowing what’s going on, because of the hundreds of brave Palestinian journalists” and other foreign journalists in the West Bank and Israel.

Source: Al Jazeera