A member of the Palestinian security forces looks out from a vehicle as they patrol amid clashes with militants at the camp, in Jenin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on Saturday (December 14, 2024).
| Photo Credit: Reuters

“At least one person was killed as Palestinian security forces clashed with Palestinian militants and set up checkpoints on Saturday (December 14, 2024) in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin,” residents and medics said.

Gunshots and explosions could be heard in the city, where friction has risen in recent days between militant factions and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas following raids by the PA.

Residents identified the man who was killed as a militant though none of the factions immediately confirmed his affiliation.

The PA’s security branch said in a statement that its forces were undertaking a security operation to restore law and order to Jenin’s historic refugee camp suburb, a stronghold of Palestinian militants alienated from the Palestinian leadership.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas, which has been fighting Israeli forces in Gaza for more than a year, condemned the PA for the Jenin operation and its allied group Islamic Jihad called for a day of protests.

Jenin has also been a hotbed of conflict between the Palestinian militant groups and the Israeli military in recent years. Since March 2022, Jenin and outlying areas in the north of the West Bank have drawn intensified Israeli raids after a spate of Palestinian street attacks.

Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Walid al-Omari, reads from military order papers that were handed to him by Israeli soldiers at the Al Jazeera office in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, September 22, 2024, in this screen grab from video.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Armed and masked Israeli forces raided the office of global news channel Al Jazeera in the occupied West Bank on Sunday (September 22, 2024) and issued a 45-day closure order.

It was the latest salvo in a long-running feud between the Arab broadcaster and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which has worsened during the war in Gaza.

Since the war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas Palestinian militants attacked Israel, Al Jazeera has aired continuous on-the-ground reporting on the effects of Israel’s military campaign.

Israel’s military has repeatedly accused journalists from the Qatar-based network of links to Hamas or its “ally Islamic Jihad”. Al Jazeera has fiercely denied these accusations and said Israel systematically targets its employees in the Gaza Strip.

Four Al Jazeera journalists have been killed since the war in Gaza began, and the network’s office in the territory has been bombed.

Israel’s military said on Sunday (September 22, 2024) the Ramallah office was closed because it was “used to incite terror” and “support terrorist activities” and because Al Jazeera’s broadcasts endangered Israel’s security.

“The channel’s offices have been sealed and its equipment has been confiscated,” a military statement said.

Al Jazeera slams Israel’s ‘criminal’ raid

Al Jazeera called the Israeli raid “a criminal act” and an attack on press freedom.

In a conversation during the raid broadcast live on the network, an Israeli soldier told Al Jazeera’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari there was a court ruling to close down the office for 45 days.

“I ask you to take all the cameras and leave the office at this moment,” the soldier is seen as saying in the footage.

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

The Ramallah-based Palestinian Foreign Ministry condemned the Israeli operation as “a flagrant violation” of press freedom.

Shuttering the Al Jazeera office “confirms the (Israeli) occupation’s efforts to disrupt the work of the media in conveying the occupation’s violations against the Palestinian people,” said Mohammed Abu al-Rub, director of the government media office for the Palestinian Authority, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank.

‘No surprise’

The Foreign Press Association in Israel and the Palestinian Territories said it was “deeply troubled by this escalation” and called on Israel to “reconsider” the move.

“Restricting foreign reporters and closing news channels signals a shift away from democratic values,” the association’s board said in a statement.

In April, the Israeli Parliament passed a law allowing the banning of foreign media broadcasts deemed harmful to state security. Based on this law, Israel’s government on May 5 approved the decision to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from Israel and close its offices for an initial 45-day period, which was extended for a fourth time by a Tel Aviv court last week.

The network condemned that decision as “criminal”, saying it “violates the human right to access information”.

Israel’s Government last week announced it was revoking the press credentials of Al Jazeera journalists in the country.

The shutdown had not affected broadcasts from the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, from which Al Jazeera was still covering the Gaza war.

Al Jazeera correspondent Nida Ibrahim said the closure of the network’s West Bank office “comes as no surprise” after the earlier ban on reporting from inside Israel.

“We’ve heard Israeli officials threatening to close down the bureau,” she said on the network. The media office of the Hamas-run government in Gaza condemned Sunday’s raid, saying in a statement it was a “resounding scandal and a blatant violation of press freedom”.

Qatar, which partly funds Al Jazeera, also served as a base for Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. He was killed in July during a strike in Tehran, which Iran and Hamas blamed on Israel.

Hamas’s October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, on the Israeli side, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,431 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the territory’s health ministry. The United Nations has acknowledged the figures as reliable.

People taking part in a march in support of the Palestinian people ahead of the Nakba day at the Al Kasayir village, in Haifa on May 14, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Palestinians on Wednesday will mark the 76th year of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel, an event that is at the core of their national struggle. But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now unfolding in Gaza.

Palestinians refer to it as the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. Some 7,00,000 Palestinians — a majority of the pre-war population — fled or were driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.

After the war, Israel refused to allow them to return because it would have resulted in a Palestinian majority within its borders. Instead, they became a seemingly permanent refugee community that now numbers some 6 million, with most living in slum-like urban refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Thorny issue

Israel’s rejection of what Palestinians say is their right of return has been a core grievance in the conflict and was one of the thorniest issues in peace talks that last collapsed 15 years ago.

Now, many Palestinians fear a repeat of their painful history on an even more cataclysmic scale.

Also read: ‘The Nakba was the core of our feelings and thinking’

All across Gaza, Palestinians in recent days have been loading up cars and donkey carts or setting out on foot to already overcrowded tent camps as Israel expands its offensive. The images from several rounds of mass evacuations throughout the seven-month war are strikingly similar to black-and-white photographs from 1948.

Mustafa al-Gazzar, now 81, still recalls his family’s monthslong flight from their village in what is now central Israel to the southern city of Rafah, when he was 5. Mr. al-Gazzar, now a great-grandfather, was forced to flee again over the weekend. He says the conditions are worse than in 1948, when the UN agency for Palestinian refugees was able to regularly provide food and other essentials.

“My hope in 1948 was to return, but my hope today is to survive,” he said. “I live in such fear,” he added, breaking into tears.

The war has forced some 1.7 million Palestinians — around three quarters of the territory’s population — to flee their homes, often multiple times. That is well over twice the number that fled before and during the 1948 war.

Fearing exodus

Israel has sealed its border. Egypt has only allowed a small number of Palestinians to leave, in part because it fears a mass influx of Palestinians could generate another long-term refugee crisis.

The international community is strongly opposed to any mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza — an idea embraced by far-right members of the Israeli government, who refer to it as “voluntary emigration.”

Israel has long called for the refugees of 1948 to be absorbed into host countries, saying that calls for their return are unrealistic and would endanger its existence as a Jewish-majority state. It points to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries during the turmoil following its establishment, though few of them want to return.

Even if Palestinians are not expelled from Gaza en masse, many fear that they will never be able to return to their homes or that the destruction wreaked on the territory will make it impossible to live there. A recent UN estimate said it would take until 2040 to rebuild destroyed homes.