Israeli soldiers storm Al Jazeera office in Ramallah and order its closure | News

Israeli soldiers have raided Al Jazeera's offices in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank and ordered the Doha-based news channel to cease operations amid Israel's increasing crackdown on press freedom.

Heavily armed and masked Israeli soldiers forcibly entered the building that houses Al Jazeera's office early Sunday and handed the 45-day closure order to the broadcaster's West Bank bureau chief, Walid al-Omari.

Al Jazeera's bureau chief said the Israeli military's closure order accused the network of “inciting terrorism and supporting terrorism.”

Al Jazeera's Jivara Budeiri said Israeli forces fired tear gas near the Al Jazeera office 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 might try to destroy Al Jazeera's archives stored at the office.

Israeli military vehicles left Ramallah after the attack.

Al Jazeera's Nida Ibrahim said in a telephone conversation from Ramallah that the raid and closure order in the West Bank were “no surprise” after previously banning reporting from Israel.

“We have heard that Israeli officials are threatening to close the office. We have heard that the government has discussed it and called on the military ruler in the occupied West Bank to close and shut down the channel. But we [had] “I didn’t expect it to happen today,” said Ibrahim.

Sunday's attack came just months after the Israeli government banned Al Jazeera from broadcasting inside Israel in May due to the devastating war in the Gaza Strip, which has been left in ruins by the nonstop bombings of the past 11 months.

This original closure order was also valid for 45 days, but has been extended and Al Jazeera journalists are still unable to report from the country.

After the raid, office chief al-Omari expressed concern about what Israeli soldiers might do to the office.

“When journalists are targeted in this way, the aim is always to erase the truth and prevent people from knowing the truth,” he said.

The state media office in the Gaza Strip described the Israeli move as a “deafening scandal.”

“We call on all media organizations and groups concerned with human rights around the world to condemn this heinous crime… it represents a blatant violation of press and media freedom,” it said.

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

He said that “the closure of Al Jazeera's office represents the culmination of the declared war against journalists who are subjected to systematic Zionist terrorism aimed at concealing the truth.”

Killing and suppression of journalists

Media rights groups have criticized the Israeli government for its restrictions and attacks on journalists, particularly Palestinian reporters on the ground in Gaza, as Israel wages war on the besieged enclave.

Since the war began in October last year, Israeli forces have killed 173 journalists, according to a count by the Government Media Office. International journalists are prohibited from reporting independently from the enclave.

The journalists killed include Ismail al-Ghoul and Samer Abudaqa of Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera's Arab correspondent Ismail Abu Omar was also seriously injured in an Israeli attack in February.

However, there were already attacks on Al Jazeera reporters before 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 military had already bombed a tower in the Gaza Strip that housed the network’s offices.

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

“Israel's ongoing suppression of the free press, which is seen as an attempt to cover up its actions in the Gaza Strip, violates international and humanitarian law,” the network said in a statement in May.

“Israel’s targeted attacks and killings of journalists, its arrests, intimidation and threats will not stop Al Jazeera from reporting.”

Sunday's raid underscores Israel's tight control over the occupied West Bank, including areas supposedly under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, such as Ramallah.

This came two days after the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to end the Israeli occupation.

Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut also said the raid was part of a long-standing Israeli policy to prevent “the publication of real news about the Palestinians or about what the State of Israel is doing to the Palestinians.”

But Khouri told Al Jazeera that closing the office “will not stop the world from knowing what is going on because of the hundreds of brave Palestinian journalists” and other foreign journalists in the West Bank and Israel.