On Wednesday morning, Al-Aqsa Mosque witnessed a large-scale incursion by around 1,300 Israeli settlers under heavy protection from the occupation police, as part of the Jewish “Feast of Tabernacles” (Sukkot) celebrations, which last for a week.
According to the Islamic Waqf Department in Jerusalem, the settlers entered the mosque’s courtyards in successive groups amid a heavy presence of occupation police both inside and around the compound. Meanwhile, the occupation authorities prevented Palestinian worshippers from accessing the mosque and restricted those who managed to enter.
The incursions are expected to continue over the coming days, as settler groups have called for intensified presence at Al-Aqsa. Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir appeared in video footage at the Buraq Plaza (Western Wall area), taking part in religious rituals with extremist settlers and calling for what he described as “victory in the war and the destruction of Hamas.”
Since Ben-Gvir assumed office in late 2022, he has repeatedly stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque as part of a systematic policy aimed at imposing temporal and spatial division of the holy site in a blatant violation of the established legal and historical status quo, which international conventions recognise as an exclusively Muslim place of worship.
These developments come amid the ongoing Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip since October 2023, which has so far killed more than 67,000 Palestinians and injured around 170,000 others, most of them women and children in one of the deadliest military campaigns in modern history.
The repeated incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque constitute a flagrant violation of freedom of worship and a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which obliges an occupying power to respect religious sites in occupied territories. They also form part of a broader policy of religious discrimination imposed by the occupation authorities against the Palestinian people in Jerusalem.
The continued assaults on Al-Aqsa warn of serious escalation, as they are accompanied by systematic efforts to restrict Palestinian presence in the Holy City and to impose a settlement reality aimed at erasing Jerusalem’s Arab and Islamic identity, turning it into a city fully under Israeli control.
In the absence of a firm international stance, the occupation’s violations in Jerusalem persist unchecked, reflecting the failure of the international system to uphold justice and accountability as enshrined in international humanitarian law, effectively encouraging the occupation to proceed with its Judaization policies and erasure of the city’s religious and historical identity.
