Israeli forces raid Al Jazeera’s West Bank office, issue 45 day ban on its journalism
Beirut, September 22, 2024 – The Committee to Protect Journalists called on Israeli authorities to stop harassing and obstructing Al Jazeera after armed Israeli forces raided the Qatari broadcaster’s office in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah during a live broadcast early Sunday morning, ordered its closure for 45 days, and forced its staff to leave.
“CPJ is deeply alarmed by Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera’s office in the occupied West Bank, just months after it shuttered Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel after deeming it a threat to national security,” said CPJ’s program director, Carlos Martínez de la Serna, 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. Al Jazeera’s journalists must be allowed to report at this critical time, and always.”
Al Jazeera aired footage of the raid, during which soldiers confiscated documents and equipment from the office. Soldiers seized the microphone from Al Jazeera’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari while he was live on air with correspondent Givara Budeiri outside the building. Al Jazeera said the forces also removed a poster of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American correspondent murdered by Israeli forces in 2022, from the building.
The September 22 military order accused the broadcast’s West Bank operations of “incitement to and support of terrorism.” Israeli communications minister Shlomo Karhi confirmed the raid in a statement to Reuters, calling Al Jazeera a “mouthpiece” for Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. “We will continue to fight the enemy channels and ensure the safety of our heroic fighters,” he said.
CPJ’s headquarters in New York emailed the Israel Defense Forces’ North America desk for comment on the raid and closure but received no immediate response.
“This is part of a larger campaign against the Palestinian outlets and media in general aimed at erasing the truth,” al-Omari said in an interview with Al Araby Al Jadeed. “We’ve been under increasing incitement since the beginning of the war.”
In May, the Israeli cabinet voted to ban Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel after the country’s parliament passed a law authorizing the shutdown of foreign channels’ broadcasts if the content was deemed to be a threat to the country’s security during the ongoing war. Until Sunday the broadcaster had continued to operate from Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the West Bank under Israeli military occupation; it still operates in Gaza, where the Israeli military has killed numerous Al Jazeera staff and freelancers since the start of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023.