Israeli Forces Raid Al Jazeera’s West Bank Bureau In Latest Attack On The Press

Israeli troops raided Al Jazeera’s offices in the occupied West Bank early Sunday, the government’s latest attack on press freedom and specifically the Qatar-based news network, which has long reported on the Israeli military’s actions and intensely covered the past year’s campaigns in occupied Palestinian territories and surrounding countries.

More than 20 heavily armed and masked Israeli forces stormed into the Al Jazeera offices in Ramallah and gave bureau chief Walid al-Omari a military order to shut everything down for 45 days, as shown in footage of the raid that the network aired on its Arabic-language channel. Troops carrying out the overnight raid said staff had 10 minutes to gather their belongings, leave behind press equipment and evacuate the office ― seizing al-Omari’s microphone while he was live on air outside the building.

Israeli authorities accused Al Jazeera of using the newsroom to “incite terror” and serving as a “mouthpiece” for Hamas and Hezbollah, but did not provide any evidence to back up the claims. The network fervently denounced the “unfounded allegations,” saying that its journalists “will not be intimidated” by Israeli forces’ “criminal act.”

“Israel’s ongoing suppression of the free press is blatantly aimed at concealing its actions in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, in contravention of international and humanitarian law,” the network said in a statement on Sunday. “Israel’s direct targeting and killing of journalists, along with arrests, intimidation and threats, will not deter Al Jazeera from its commitment to coverage.”

After the hourslong raid, network employees said soldiers welded the Ramallah bureau’s doors shut. Ramallah sits in the occupied West Bank’s Area A, which is supposed to be under full political and security control of the Palestinian Authority as decided in the 1993 Oslo Accords.

The military order to close Al Jazeera’s newsroom cited a 1945 law dating back to the British Mandate of Palestine when Israel was not yet a state, al-Omari told Turkish outlet TRT. The bureau chief said the network can file an appeal within seven days through the Israeli military court system.

The U.S. State Department did not return HuffPost’s request for comment on the raid, and the White House has yet to release a statement on the matter.

Sunday’s raid was not the first time Israeli authorities have targeted Al Jazeera, one of the only news outlets that have been able to consistently and critically report from the ground on Israel’s devastating U.S.-funded military offensives in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Israeli authorities continue to block foreign journalists from reporting within Gaza, where the military has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians over the past year while destroying their homes and life-supporting infrastructure ― video and photo evidence of which has been widely shared to the public largely thanks to independent Palestinian journalists and Al Jazeera reporters.

The bureau closure “probably means that there’s going to be a bigger onslaught … of Israeli violence all over the West Bank,” Rami Khouri, a Middle East expert at American University in Lebanon, said in an interview with Al Jazeera English. “And the primary instrument for informing the world about what Israel is doing is not going to be available to do it.”

Although the current military campaign began after Hamas militants killed 1,200 people during an October attack in Israel, Al Jazeera has long been an Israeli target due to its decades-long coverage of the state’s occupation. The network was forced to close its East Jerusalem bureau in May after the Knesset passed a law one month earlier, allowing the government to shut down any foreign media it perceives as a threat to Israeli security for 45 days at a time. Despite the closures appearing temporary, Israeli authorities can and have been renewing the order to keep the offices shut.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is “deeply alarmed” by the shuttering of Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah, the watchdog’s program director Carlos Martínez de la Serna said on Sunday in New York.

“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,” he continued. “Al Jazeera’s journalists must be allowed to report at this critical time, and always.”

Al Jazeera and independent journalists have also been killed, detained, assaulted, threatened and faced cyberattacks, mostly by Israeli forces that claim they do not target journalists. CPJ can confirm at least 116 journalists and media workers have been killed since the nearly yearlong military offensive began ― with 111 of those being Palestinian, three Lebanese and two Israeli. The International Federation of Journalists puts that number at 134.

Included in that death toll are Al Jazeera journalists Hamza Dahdouh, Samer Abu Daqqa, Ismail al-Ghoul and Rami al-Rifi. Israeli forces killed those journalists in Gaza while they were covering the devastation that much of the international community has now described as genocidal.

In 2022, soldiers fatally shot Palestinian American and widely respected veteran Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh while she was covering an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, and violently attacked attendees at her funeral. The Al Jazeera footage of Sunday’s raid shows Israeli forces walking past portraits of the network’s fallen journalists, and newsroom staff said soldiers tore down the banner of a smiling Abu Akleh at the Ramallah office, which sits on a street named after her.

“This is not the first time this has happened. There is a memorial for Shireen set up in Jenin in the occupied West Bank that the Israeli army has also desecrated,” Al Jazeera correspondent Hamdah Salhut reported from the territory on Sunday.

“Israel says that it’s a beacon of democracy that supports the free press, but of course all of its actions show otherwise,” she continued. “Palestine is the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, and these policies that are by the Israeli government make it even more dangerous.”