A persistent buzzing sound made people look up to the sky. "A drone," said Walid Al-Omari calmly. The Al Jazeera director in the occupied Palestinian territories has far more pressing matters than to dwell on the flying device over Ramallah. The tall man in his sixties, a staple in the Arab media scene, has been working tirelessly for a month and a half to ensure the Qatari network can continue operating in the West Bank, despite the Israeli army's closure of its Ramallah bureau.
The order was issued on September 22 for 45 days, and on Wednesday, November 6, as the deadline approached, the Al Jazeera team expected the sanction to be renewed. The order to close the channel's East Jerusalem bureau, imposed earlier on May 5, had been extended several times. "The Israelis want to control all information about what's going on here. I'm not optimistic," said Walid Al-Omari. On Wednesday evening, with no notice from the Israeli authorities, the channel's journalists planned to remove the seals from the entrance to the offices, at the risk of seeing Israeli soldiers invade the premises again.
On September 22, at 3 am, during the search of the channel's offices in central Ramallah, Al-Omari was present. A few minutes later, he found himself reading the closure notice live, microphone in hand, in front of a squad of soldiers. The channel is accused of "inciting terror" and "endangering security and public order in the region and throughout the State of Israel," he read, before adding: "The order does not come from the Israeli judiciary but from the Israeli command in the West Bank." "I ask you to take your cameras and leave the premises immediately," interrupted a soldier, as seen on the latest images broadcast by the channel.
Since then, the Al Jazeera offices, located at the top of a shopping mall, have been closed. On the eighth floor, rusted iron plates have been welded onto the double entrance doors, where two handwritten notices in Hebrew remain, detailing the confiscated equipment. "Journalism is not a crime," reads a poster next to the door. On the seventh floor, right below, access to the offices of Al Jazeera English, the English-speaking branch of the Qatari channel, is also restricted. Portraits of American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by an Israeli soldier on May 11, 2022, while covering a raid by occupying forces in Jenin, in the northern West Bank, have disappeared from the building's exterior. Al-Omari was part of the delegation that went to the International Criminal Court in The Hague on December 6, 2022, to report a war crime.
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