Middle East Monitor / July 11, 2024
Israeli occupation forces sealed the yard of the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron/Al-Khalil in an attempt to change its features, a Palestinian official said today.
“The Israeli authorities are constantly seeking to change the features of the mosque and Judaize it,” Ghassan al-Rajabi, an official with the Hebron Endowments Authority, told Anadolu.
He termed the Israeli move as a “grave assault” on the Muslim place of worship.
“The mosque is a purely Islamic endowment and Israeli authorities have no right to it,” he said.
“Israel is exploiting the state of war [in Gaza] to implement their agenda by seizing holy sites,” Al-Rajabi said.
After the massacre of 29 Palestinian worshippers in 1994 inside the mosque by extremist Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, Israeli authorities divided the mosque complex between Muslim and Jewish worshippers. However occupation forces regularly close the mosque off to Muslim worshippers in order to allow settlers to mark festivals.
Hebron is home to roughly 160,000 Palestinian Muslims and about 500 hardline Jewish settlers who live in a series of Jewish-only enclaves heavily guarded by Israeli troops.
