Heavily armed and masked occupation soldiers storm the Al Jazeera office in the occupied West Bank and hand the office an order to close it for 45 days.
Gunfire and tear gas continue to be heard around Al Jazeera’s offices in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, after Israeli occupation soldiers stormed the office and closed it down.
Heavily armed and masked Israeli occupation soldiers stormed the Al Jazeera office building on Sunday morning and handed the network’s West Bank office director, Walid Al-Omari, a 45-day closure order.
They did not provide a reason for their decision.
Speaking by phone from Ramallah, Al Jazeera correspondent Nidaa Ibrahim said the West Bank raid and closure order was “not surprising” after the previous ban on news coverage from inside Israel.
“We have heard Israeli officials threatening to close the office. We have heard the government discussing this, and asking the military governor in the occupied West Bank to close the channel. But we have not received any response from their side. [had] “I didn’t expect this to happen today,” Ibrahim said.
Sunday’s raid comes just months after the Israeli government banned Al Jazeera from operating inside Israel in May.
The initial closure order was also for 45 days, but it has been renewed and Al Jazeera journalists are still unable to report from inside the country.
After the raid, Al-Omari, the head of the office, expressed his concerns about what the occupation soldiers might do to the office.
“Targeting journalists in this way is always aimed at erasing the truth and preventing people from hearing the truth,” he said.
The government media office in Gaza described the Israeli move as a “horrific scandal.”
The organization said in its statement, “We call on all organizations and media bodies that deal with human rights in the world to condemn this heinous crime… which constitutes a flagrant violation of freedom of the press and media.”
Killing and silencing journalists
Media rights groups have criticized the Israeli government for restrictions and attacks on journalists, especially Palestinian correspondents on the ground in Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing war on the besieged enclave.
Since the war began in October last year, Israeli forces have killed 173 journalists, according to the government media office.
Among the journalists killed were Ismail al-Ghoul and Samer Abu Daqqa of Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Ismail Abu Omar was also seriously injured in an Israeli airstrike last February.
However, the attacks against Al Jazeera correspondents predated the war in Gaza.
In 2022, Israeli occupation 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 had also bombed a tower housing the network’s offices in Gaza.
Al Jazeera condemned the ban on news coverage inside Israel earlier this year, calling it a “criminal act that violates human rights and the basic right to access information.”
“Israel’s continued suppression of the free press, which is seen as an attempt to conceal its actions in the Gaza Strip, is contrary to international and humanitarian law,” the network said in a statement last May.
“Israel’s direct targeting, killing, arresting, intimidating and threatening of journalists will not deter Al Jazeera from its commitment to coverage.”
The raid on Sunday highlights Israel’s tight control over the occupied West Bank, including areas supposedly under Palestinian Authority control such as Ramallah.
This comes two days after the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of ending the Israeli occupation.
Rami Khouri, a fellow at the American University of Beirut, said the raid was part of a long-standing Israeli policy aimed at “preventing the spread of real news about Palestinians or what the state of Israel is doing to Palestinians.”
But Khoury told Al Jazeera that closing the office would not “prevent the world from knowing what is going on, thanks to the hundreds of brave Palestinian journalists” and other foreign journalists in the West Bank and Israel.
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