Israeli army soldiers stormed the offices of Al Jazeera in the West Bank city Ramallah and they have imposed a 45-day closure to the pan-Arab network, as reported by the head of the office, Walid Al Omari.
The journalist stressed that Israeli soldiers ‘heavily armed and masked’ They entered the building where the channel’s headquarters are located and ordered it to close without explaining the reasons for this decision.
“There is a court order to shut down Al Jazeera for 45 days (…). I ask you to take all the cameras and leave the office immediately,” a soldier told Al Omari in Arabic as the channel broadcast the conversation live on television.
Al Jazeera denounced the move as “a last attempt to restrict media coverage” that he is leading the military offensive against the West Bank and Gaza, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government banned him in May from reporting from Israeli territory, considering his broadcasts an attack on the integrity of the state and a propaganda mechanism for the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
In this sense, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Ramallah, Nida Ibrahimacknowledged that what happened this Sunday “it’s not a surprise“We heard Israeli officials threatening to close the office. We heard the government talking about it, asking the military chief of the occupied West Bank to close and shut down the canal. But we did not expect this to happen today,” he said.
For his part, Al Omari expressed concern about what the Israeli army could do within the editorial office to “erase the truth and prevent people from hearing the truth“Local sources informed the Palestinian news agency WAFA that the soldiers documents and devices were seized from the Al Jazeera team, which denounced the “tight control exercised by Israel over the occupied West Bank, including areas supposed to be under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority”
The Gaza government’s media office condemned this.deafening scandal“, calling on “all” human rights organisations to condemn “this atrocious crime (…) which constitutes a flagrant violation of freedom of the press”.
According to this organization, 173 journalists lost their lives at the hands of the Israeli armysince it launched the offensive after Hamas attacks on October 7. They include Al Jazeera journalists Ismail Al Ghoul and Samer Abudaqa.
For its part, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate denounced this “arbitrary decision” which represents a “new aggression against the press” and expressed its “solidarity” with Al Jazeera, offering its headquarters and capacities to the channel’s workers.
