Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera’s offices in the occupied West Bank is harming the Qatari network’s coverage in the territory and heightening fears for its journalists, says the news bureau’s chief Walid al-Omari.

The closure, which happened on 22 September, was labelled an essential security step by Israeli officials, against what they describe as a Hamas mouthpiece. It has widely been seen among Palestinians as a means of limiting information coming from the West Bank in advance of an expected escalation of military moves. The initial closure period is 45 days. 

And in fact, following the closure of the news centre, the Israeli air force carried out the deadliest single attack in the occupied West Bank in more than two decades, killing at least 18 people in the bombing of a cafe in Tulkarm Refugee Camp, according to Palestinian security services. 

“The main goal of this closure and of increasing the pressure on journalists is to prevent the transmission of the picture of what’s happening in the West Bank so that there won’t be knowledge of what Israel is doing and the crimes it is committing,” said political analyst Jehad Harb, a former researcher on Palestinian politics at the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah.

Israel has already blocked free access to Gaza for foreign journalists. This is suggested to be to limit international exposure of its year-long assault on Gaza, triggered by Hamas’s brutal incursion on 7 October 2023. Israel also faces allegations that it is actively targeting Palestinian media personnel. 

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of 9 October 2024, 128 journalists and media personnel have been killed in Gaza since the war began. It has documented five cases in which journalists were directly targeted and killed. Israel denies targeting journalists and says most of those being counted were actually operatives of Hamas and other militant groups.

In a phone interview, Walid al-Omari told me that Al Jazeera staff feel displaced and worried. “We are refugees now,” he said. “We don’t have a place. Sometimes we meet in a cafe, a restaurant, our homes or in hotels.” 

The closure has heightened concerns for the station’s journalists that they could become targets, he said, thus Al Jazeera employees are not venturing out to the flashpoints they usually cover. “It’s harder,” he said. “We can’t send our correspondents. The situation is not clear. If they appear as Al Jazeera correspondents, the army might arrest them.

“We continue covering everything, but it’s not the same as before. We cannot send footage from here so they take other sources.”

He said the West Bank coverage is now being directed out of Qatar, which relies on freelancers, guests and news agencies. Most of the 30 Ramallah employees, from both the Arabic and English outlets, are considered on vacation for now, he added.

Al-Omari dismissed Israeli allegations that the Ramallah offices were used for incitement and encouraging terrorism, and said such statements could spark attacks on staff. “We are not lying, inciting or provoking. We are trying to do our professional duty.”

In the view of Daoud Kuttab, a veteran Palestinian-American journalist based in Amman, Jordan, news from the West Bank can still get out, but clamping down on Al Jazeera is having an impact: “Now, Al Jazeera is more limited,” he said. “The facts will still come out but they won’t be able to synchronise and have multiple journalists and editors working on the equipment they own. The closure hobbles their work, but it doesn’t stop it.”

While the closure is reverberating in the West Bank, it should also be seen within the context of parallel steps being taken by Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition inside Israel itself. These steps are also billed as anti-incitement steps needed during war but they could markedly limit freedom of expression, especially among Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are already being singled out often with no basis, according to human rights lawyers.

The coalition recently advanced a bill that would enable rapid dismissal of teachers and school budgets to be cut by the education ministry if they support terrorism. It is also trying to enable police to make what critics say would be “political arrests” on a large scale by broadening the definition of incitement and removing a requirement that state attorneys have to approve arrests for suspicion of incitement.

Such crackdowns as the Al Jazeera closure are popular with the coalition’s right-wing base. “The government of Israel does not allow a media outlet that broadcasts propaganda for a terrorist organisation and endangers IDF soldiers to operate, especially in times of war, based on principles of protecting the state and its citizens,” read a statement from the office of Shlomo Karhi, the communications minister.

Zvi Sukkot, a far-right legislator who chairs a Knesset subcommittee dealing with the West Bank, told Index: “There is a difference between media freedom and freedom to incite to murder Jews. Any station that incites to murder Jews should be closed.” 

Al Jazeera could definitely be perceived to be a pro-Hamas station, even sometimes airing unedited videos of Hamas fighters released by the militant group’s media offices. But some Israeli specialists question if the office closure was warranted. 

Israel could be more concerned about the network’s ability to cover scenes of people in Gaza lifting rubble to find the remains of their family members after airstrikes, rather than its ability to give a platform to Hamas supporters. Al-Omari also said that Al Jazeera live streams press conferences of Israeli leaders and the IDF’s spokesperson.

Matti Steinberg, an Israeli academic and author specialising in Palestinians and the former senior adviser to the Shin Bet security service, criticised the closure: “I follow Al Jazeera tirelessly for my work and I can’t understand this decision,” he said. “I haven’t seen any indication it poses a security threat.”

In practical terms, the 22 September raid marked the extension of a law that was passed in April in Israel, to the West Bank; this allows the government to close foreign outlets that are deemed to pose a substantive threat to state security. That law was first applied to Al Jazeera operations within Israel, forcing the network to move its Jerusalem office staff to Ramallah and closing its Israel-based cable and satellite transmissions.

Now, with international attention focused on Israel’s incursion into Lebanon and the Gaza death toll continuing to mount, Israel has also been intensifying its military activity in the West Bank, which it says is aimed at targeting terrorists or are planning attacks on Israel. 

But the raids leave broad destruction and displace residents, scenes usually captured by Al Jazeera, as one of the region’s most resourced and largest news outlets. Harb sees Al Jazeera as a double threat to Israel’s effort to control the West Bank information flow, with its Arabic station, the most popular in the Middle East, and its English channel, which reaches the international community (and which also worked out of the Ramallah offices).

The English language station has a different editorial team than the Arabic one and, according to Kuttab, offers a “softer presentation of the same issue”. This is because the international audience that Al Jazeera English targets would switch channels if it is too bombastic and also because its presenters have worked in the Western media, he said.

Al Omari said that roughly 70 soldiers, some of them masked, participated in the action in and around Al Jazeera’s offices. He said troops tore down a banner of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist killed by the Israeli army while she covered a raid in the West Bank in May 2022. 

Al-Omari alleged the closure was an Israeli violation of self-rule agreements, since it took place in an area designated as being under full control of the Palestinian Authority. The heavy-handed raid may have been a deliberate effort to frighten other outlets, he added.

The Union of Journalists in Israel condemned the raid, saying the closure lacked transparency and that it could help pave the way for the closure of Israeli news outlets that the government dislikes. But the group’s announcement elicited a tide of criticism by journalists and others that it is taking Hamas’s side, and some threatened to stop paying dues. “Some of our journalists don’t understand that the moment is drawing near when the knock will come to their door also,” said Anat Saragusti, press freedom director for the union.