An intoxicating roar makes you look to the sky. “A drone”Walid Al-Omari placidly comments. The director of Al-Jazeera in the occupied Palestinian territories has many other concerns besides focusing on the machine flying over Ramallah. This senior in his sixties, a figure on the Arab media scene, has been fighting for a month and a half to keep the Qatari channel operating in the West Bank, despite the closure of its offices in Ramallah by Israel. army.
The measure was imposed on September 22, for a period of forty-five days, and, on Wednesday, November 6, at the end of this period, the Al-Jazeera team expected the sanction to be renewed. The order to close the channel’s premises in East Jerusalem, issued a few months earlier, on May 5, has been extended several times. “The Israelis want to control all the information about what happens here, I am not optimistic”sighs Walid Al-Omari. On Wednesday night, in the absence of notification from Israeli authorities, the channel’s journalists were considering removing the seals placed on the main door of their offices. At the risk of Israeli soldiers invading the place for a second time…
On September 22, at 3 in the morning, when the channel’s facilities, located in the center of Ramallah, were raided, Walid Al-Omari was there. A few minutes later, he found himself reading the closure notice live, microphone in hand, in front of a platoon of soldiers. The channel is accused of“incite terror” and put “endangers security and public order in the region and throughout the State of Israel”He said, before continuing: “The order does not come from the Israeli justice system, but from the Israeli command in the West Bank. » “I ask you to take your cameras and leave the premises immediately”A soldier interrupted him, according to the latest images broadcast by the channel.
“We are victims of a campaign”
Since that date, Al-Jazeera’s offices, located at the top of a shopping center, have been closed. On the eighth floor, rusty iron plates have been welded together, blocking the double entrance door in which two handwritten sheets remain detailing, in Hebrew, the confiscated material. “Journalism is not a crime” (“Journalism is not a crime”), proclaims a sign next to it. On the ground floor, on the seventh, access to the offices of Al-Jazeera English, the English-speaking channel of the Qatari group, is also prohibited. Portraits of American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by an Israeli soldier on May 11, 2022, while covering a raid by occupation forces in Jenin, northern West Bank, have disappeared from the building’s exterior façade . Walid Al-Omari was part of the delegation that went, on December 6, 2022, to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to denounce a war crime.
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