Israeli forces raided Al Jazeera’s office in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah during a live broadcast early Sunday, September 22, morning, ordered its closure for 45 days, and forced its staff to leave.

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.

“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.