Israeli forces raid Al Jazeera Ramallah bureau with closure order
Recent months have seen a concerted effort by authorities to crack down on the network, regarded by Israel as propagating inflammatory pro-Hamas rhetoric
Qatari Al Jazeera TV said on Sunday morning that Israeli forces stormed its bureau in the West Bank’s Ramallah city with a military order to close it for 45 days.
The Qatar-based channel aired live footage of the Israeli troops raiding the channel’s office and handing a closure order to one of its staff before the broadcast was disrupted.
“There is a court ruling for closing down Al Jazeera for 45 days,” an Israeli soldier told Al Jazeera’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari, the network reported.
“I ask you to take all the cameras and leave the office at this moment,” the soldier said, according to the footage, which showed heavily armed and masked troops entering the office in Ramallah.
Recent months have seen a concerted effort by Israeli authorities to crack down on the network, regarded by many as propagating inflammatory anti-Israel and pro-Hamas rhetoric.
Omari said the closure order accused the network of “incitement to and support of terrorism,” according to Al Jazeera.
“Targeting journalists this way always aims to erase the truth and prevent people from hearing the truth,” the bureau chief said.
لحظة اقتحام قوات الاحتلال الإسرائيلي مكتب قناة #الجزيرة برام الله مع أمر عسكري بغلقه 45 يوما#حرب_غزة #الأخبار pic.twitter.com/EKdkgCRSCT
— قناة الجزيرة (@AJArabic) September 22, 2024
Al Jazeera correspondent Nida Ibrahim said the network’s West Bank office closure “comes as no surprise” after Al Jazeera was hit with an earlier ban on reporting from inside Israel.
“We’ve heard Israeli officials threatening to close down the bureau,” she said on the network. “But we (had) not been expecting it to happen today.”
Another Al Jazeera journalist said staff were prevented from reporting on the raid and their cameras were confiscated.
In a statement, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate condemned the Israeli move, saying “this arbitrary military decision is considered a new violation against journalistic and media works, which has been exposing the occupation’s crimes against the Palestinian people.”
In May, Israeli authorities raided a Jerusalem hotel room used by Al Jazeera as its office after the government decided to shut down the Al Jazeera TV station’s local operations, saying it threatened national security.
Israel took the network off the air and blocked its broadcasts following an emergency law passed in April.
The initial Knesset law allowed Israel to ban the TV station for a 45-day period, with further 45-day renewals subject to court approval. The Tel Aviv District Court has renewed the ban four times since then, mostly recently last week.
In a June ruling, the court found that there was a direct and causal connection between individuals who have carried out terror attacks inside Israel and the consumption of Al Jazeera content.
It also determined that there was a “close connection” between Al Jazeera and Hamas, that some Al Jazeera reporters in Gaza had turned themselves into “assistants and partners” with the Palestinian terror group, and that some of them had even carried out terror attacks.
The shutdown had not affected broadcasts from the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, from which Al Jazeera was still covering Israel’s war with Hamas that began on October 7 when the Palestinian terror group led a devastating cross-border attack on southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage.
