• Four journalists of the network have been killed and its office in Gaza bombed
• Tel Aviv blamed the channel endangered Israel’s security

RAMALLAH: Armed and masked Israeli forces raided the office of global news channel Al Jazeera in the occupied West Bank on Sunday and issued a 45-day closure order.

It was the latest salvo in a long-running feud between the Arab broadcaster and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government which has worsened during the conflict in Gaza.

Since October 7, Al Jazeera has aired continuous on-the-ground reporting on the effects of Israel’s military campaign. Israel’s military has repeatedly accused journalists from the Qatar-based network of links to Hamas or its ally Islamic Jihad.

Al Jazeera has fiercely denied these accusations and said Israel systematically targets its employees in the Gaza Strip.

Four Al Jazeera journalists have been killed since the war in Gaza began, and the network’s office in the territory has been bombed.

Israel’s military said on Sunday the Ramallah office was closed because it was “used to incite terror” and “support terrorist activities”, and because Al Jazeera’s broadcasts endangered Israel’s security.

“The channel’s offices have been sealed and its equipment has been confiscated,” a military statement said.

Al Jazeera called the Israeli raid “a criminal act” and an attack on press freedom.

In a conversation during the raid broadcast live on the network, an Israeli soldier told Al Jazeera’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari there was a court ruling to close down the office for 45 days.

“I ask you to take all the cameras and leave the office at this moment,” the soldier is seen as saying in the footage.

“Targeting journalists this way always aims to erase the truth and prevent people from hearing the truth,” Omari said.

The Ramallah-based Palesti­nian foreign ministry condemned the Israeli operation as “a flagrant violation” of press freedom.

Shuttering the Al Jazeera office “confirms the (Israeli) occupation’s efforts to disrupt the work of the media in conveying the occupation’s violations against the Palestinian people,” said Mohammed Abu al-Rub, director of the government media office for the Palestinian Authority which has partial administrative control in the West Bank.

‘No surprise’

The Foreign Press Association in Israel and the Palestinian Territories said it was “deeply troubled by this escalation” and called on Israel to “reconsider” the move.

“Restricting foreign reporters and closing news channels signals a shift away from democratic values,” the association’s board said in a statement.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called on Israeli authorities to “stop harassing” Al Jazeera.

“Israel’s efforts to censor Al Jazeera severely undermine the public’s right to information on a war that has upended so many lives in the region,” CPJ’s programme director, Carlos Martinez de la Serna, said in a statement.

“Al Jazeera’s journalists must be allowed to report at this critical time, and always.” In April, the Israeli parliament passed a law allowing the banning of foreign media broadcasts deemed harmful to state security.

Based on this law, Israel’s government on May 5 approved the decision to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from Israel and close its offices for an initial 45-day period, which was extended for a fourth time by a Tel Aviv court last week. The network condemned that decision as “criminal”, saying it “violates the human right to access information”.

Israel’s government last week announced it was revoking the press credentials of Al Jazeera journalists in the country.

The shutdown had not affected broadcasts from the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, from which Al Jazeera was still covering the Gaza war.

Al Jazeera correspondent Nida Ibrahim said the closure of the network’s West Bank office “comes as no surprise” after the earlier ban on reporting from inside Israel.

“We’ve heard Israeli officials threatening to close down the bureau,” she said on the network.

The media office of the Hamas-run government in Gaza condemned Sunday’s raid, saying in a statement it was a “resounding scandal and a blatant violation of press freedom”.

Qatar, which partly funds Al Jazeera, also served as a base for Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. He was killed in July during a strike in Tehran which Iran and Hamas blamed on Israel.

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2024