Heavily armed and masked Israeli soldiers raid Al Jazeera bureau in occupied West Bank and deliver 45-day closure order.

The sounds of gunfire and teargas continue around the Al Jazeera offices in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, after Israeli soldiers raided and shuttered the bureau.

Heavily armed and masked Israeli soldiers forcefully entered the building where Al Jazeera’s bureau is and handed the 45-day closure order to the network’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari early on Sunday.

They did not provide a reason for the decision.

Speaking over the phone from Ramallah, Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim said the West Bank raid and closure order “comes as no surprise” after the earlier ban on reporting from inside Israel.

“We’ve heard Israeli officials threatening to close down the bureau. We’ve heard the government discussing this, asking the military ruler in the occupied West Bank to close down and shut down the channel. But we [had] not been expecting it to happen today,” Ibrahim said.

Sunday’s raid comes just months after the Israeli government banned Al Jazeera from operating inside Israel in May.

That initial closure order was also for 45 days, but it has been renewed and Al Jazeera journalists are still unable to report from inside the country.

After the raid, al-Omari – the bureau chief – raised concerns about what Israeli soldiers may do to the office.

“Targeting journalists this way always aims to erase the truth and prevent people from hearing the truth,” he said.

The Government Media Office in Gaza called the Israeli move a “deafening scandal”.

“We call on all media organisations and groups that deal with human rights in the world to condemn this heinous crime … that is a blatant violation of press and media freedom,” it said.

Killing and silencing journalists

Media rights groups have slammed the Israeli government for its restrictions and attacks on journalists, particularly Palestinian reporters on the ground in Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing war on the besieged enclave.

Since the start of the war in October of last year, Israeli forces have killed 173 journalists, according to a tally from the Government Media Office.

Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul and Samer Abudaqa are among the journalists killed.

Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Ismail Abu Omar was also severely injured in an Israeli strike in February.

Attacks against Al Jazeera reporters predate the war in Gaza, however.

In 2022, Israeli forces killed veteran Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh while she was reporting from Jenin in the occupied West Bank.

A year earlier, the Israeli military also bombed a tower housing the network’s offices in Gaza.

Al Jazeera condemned the ban on reporting inside Israel earlier this year, calling it a “criminal act that violates human rights and the basic right to access of information”.

“Israel’s ongoing suppression of the free press, seen as an effort to conceal its actions in the Gaza Strip, stands in contravention of international and humanitarian law,” the network said in a statement in May.

“Israel’s direct targeting and killing of journalists, arrests, intimidation and threats will not deter Al Jazeera from its commitment to cover.”

Sunday’s raid highlights Israel’s tight control over the occupied West Bank, including areas purported to be under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction such as Ramallah.

It comes two days after the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for an end to the Israeli occupation.

Rami Khouri, a fellow at the American University of Beirut, also said the raid is part of a longstanding Israeli policy of seeking to “prevent real news about Palestinians or about what the State of Israel is doing to Palestinians” from coming out.

But Khouri told Al Jazeera that the bureau’s closure won’t “stop the world from knowing what’s going on, because of the hundreds of brave Palestinian journalists” and other foreign journalists in the West Bank and in Israel.