Israeli soldiers raid Al Jazeera offices in Ramallah, impose 45-day lockdown

September 22 (EUROPA PRESS) –

Israeli soldiers stormed the offices of Al Jazeera in the West Bank city of Ramallah early Sunday morning and imposed a 45-day shutdown on the pan-Arab network, office chief Walid Al Omari said.

The journalist said that “heavily armed and masked” Israeli soldiers entered the building where the network is based and gave him the order to close it without explaining the reasons for the decision.

“There is a court order to close Al Jazeera for 45 days… I ask you to take all the cameras and leave the office right now,” a soldier told Al Omari in Arabic as the channel broadcast the conversation live on television.

Al Jazeera has denounced this measure as a “latest attempt to restrict its coverage” of the military offensive against the West Bank and Gaza, after the government of Benjamin Netanyahu banned it from reporting from Israeli territory in May, considering its broadcasts to be an attack on the integrity of the State and a propaganda mechanism for the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.

In this regard, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Ramallah, Nida Ibrahim, has acknowledged that what happened on Sunday “is no surprise.” “We have heard Israeli officials threaten to close the office. We have heard the government talk about it, asking the military chief of the occupied West Bank to close and shut down the channel. But we did not expect it to happen today,” she said.

For his part, Al Omari has expressed concern about what the Israeli military could do inside the editorial office to “erase the truth and prevent people from hearing the truth.” Local sources have informed the Palestinian news agency WAFA that the soldiers seized documents and devices from the Al Jazeera team, which has denounced “Israel’s iron grip on the occupied West Bank, including areas supposedly under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.”

The Gazan government’s Media Office has condemned this “deafening scandal”, calling on “all” human rights organisations to condemn “this heinous crime (…) which constitutes a flagrant violation of press freedom”.

According to the organisation, 173 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army since it launched its offensive following the Hamas attacks on 7 October. Among them are Al Jazeera reporters Ismail Al Ghoul and Samer Abudaqa.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Union has denounced this “arbitrary decision” which represents a “new attack on the press” and has expressed its “solidarity” with Al Jazeera, offering its headquarters and facilities to the channel’s workers.