Heavily armed and masked Israeli soldiers raid Al Jazeera’s office in the occupied West Bank and issue a 45-day closure order.
Israeli forces raided the offices of Al Jazeera in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah and imposed a 45-day shutdown in the latest move to limit the news channel’s coverage.
Heavily armed and masked Israeli soldiers entered the building and delivered the closure order to the channel’s West Bank bureau chief, Walid al-Omari, early Sunday. They did not provide a reason for the decision.
“There is a court decision to shut down Al Jazeera for 45 days,” a soldier told al-Omari as Al Jazeera Arabic broadcast the conversation live on television.
“I ask you to take all the cameras and leave the office at this time,” the soldier said in Arabic.
Sunday’s raid comes just months after the Israeli government banned Al Jazeera from operating in Israel in May.
The initial closure order was also valid for 45 days, but it was renewed and Al Jazeera journalists are still unable to cover events from inside the country.
Speaking by phone from Ramallah on Sunday, Al Jazeera correspondent Nida Ibrahim said the raid and closure order in the West Bank “is not a surprise” after the earlier ban on coverage of the events from Israel.
“We heard Israeli officials threatening to close the office. We heard the government discussing it, asking the military ruler of the occupied West Bank to close and shut down the channel. But we did not expect this to happen today,” Ibrahim said.
The Gaza government’s media office on Sunday called the Israeli decision a “deafening scandal.”
“We call on all human rights organizations and media groups around the world to condemn this heinous crime… which constitutes a flagrant violation of press and media freedom,” he said.
Media rights groups have criticized the Israeli government for its restrictions and attacks on journalists, particularly Palestinian reporters on the ground in Gaza, amid the ongoing war.
Since the war began in October 2010, Israeli forces have killed 173 journalists, according to a tally by the Gaza government’s Media Office. They include Ismail al-Ghoul and Samer Abudaqa of Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Ismail Abu Omar was also seriously injured in an Israeli strike in February.
The attacks on Al Jazeera journalists, however, predate the Gaza war.
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 army had also bombed a tower housing the network’s offices in Gaza.
Al Jazeera condemned the ban on coverage of events in Israel earlier this year, calling it “a criminal act that violates human rights and the fundamental right to access information.”
“Israel’s continued crackdown on the free press, seen as an attempt to cover up its actions in the Gaza Strip, constitutes a violation of international and humanitarian law,” the network said in a statement in May.
“Direct attacks and killings of journalists, arrests, intimidation and threats from Israel will not deter Al Jazeera from its commitment to covering the news.”
Sunday’s raid underscores Israel’s tight control over the occupied West Bank, including areas supposed to be under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction such as Ramallah.
It comes two days after the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to end the Israeli occupation.
Rami Khouri, a researcher at the American University of Beirut, also said the raid was part of a long-standing Israeli policy to “prevent the dissemination of real information about Palestinians or what the state of Israel is doing to Palestinians.”
But Khouri told Al Jazeera that closing the Al Jazeera bureau would not prevent “the world from knowing what is happening, thanks to the hundreds of brave Palestinian journalists” and other foreign journalists in the West Bank and Israel.
