Israel forces raid Al Jazeera TV in West Bank, order 45-day closure

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories — Global news channel Al Jazeera said armed and masked Israeli forces raided its office in Ramallah 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 war in Gaza.

The Israeli military has repeatedly accused journalists from the Qatari-based network of links to Hamas or its ally Islamic Jihad.

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

Four of Al Jazeera's journalists have been killed since the war in Gaza began, and the network's office in Gaza was bombed.

The broadcaster said the soldiers did not provide a reason for the closure order on Sunday.

“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 in a conversation broadcast live on the network.

“I ask you to take all the cameras and leave the office at this moment,” the soldier said, according to the footage.

Omari said the 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,” Omari said.

The Ramallah-based Palestinian foreign ministry condemned Sunday’s 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.

In April, the Israeli parliament passed a law allowing the banning of foreign media broadcasts deemed harmful to state security.

Based on this law, the Israeli government approved on May 5 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 Israel’s war with Palestinian militants.

Al Jazeera correspondent Nida Ibrahim said the network’s West Bank office closure “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.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,431 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the territory’s health ministry. The United Nations has acknowledged the figures as reliable.