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 widening Israeli crackdown on media freedom.
Heavily armed and masked Israeli soldiers forcefully entered the building where Al Jazeera’s bureau is and handed the 45-day closure order to the network’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari early on Sunday.
The Al Jazeera’s bureau chief said that the Israeli military’s closure order accused the network of “incitement to and support of terrorism”.
Al Jazeera’s Jivara Budeiri said Israeli forces fired tear gas in the vicinity of the Al Jazeera bureau and the Manara Roundabout in the heart of the occupied West Bank city. She added that Israeli soldiers confiscated their cameras. Budeiri said she feared the military may try to destroy Al Jazeera’s archives, which are stored in the office.
Israeli military vehicles have left Ramallah after the raid.
Speaking over the phone from Ramallah, Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim said the West Bank raid and closure order “comes 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.
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 non-stop bombardment for the past 11 months.
That 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 bureau chief – 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.
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 that “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”.
