It is reported by the Doha-based news network. 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 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”.
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.
In 2022, Israeli forces killed veteran Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh while she was reporting from Jenin in the occupied West Bank.