Palestinians won’t remain silent about Israel’s violation of Ibrahimi Mosque: Islamic Jihad
The Islamic Jihad movement yesterday condemned the Israeli occupation forces’ violations of the Ibrahimi Mosque in the city of Hebron, south of the occupied West Bank, and warned that the Palestinians will not be silent in the face of this new “crime” aimed at changing the mosque’s features.
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“The Israeli authorities are constantly seeking to change the features of the mosque and Judaise 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.
For its part, the Islamic Jihad movement said in a statement that “the Israeli crime against the mosque comes in the context of its plan to Judaise it along with other holy sites, impose spatial and temporal division on them, and destabilise the historical, legal and religious situation existing in the Ibrahimi Mosque and change its Islamic identity.”
The movement stressed that the “Palestinian people will not remain silent in the face of these attacks and will confront them with all their might in defence of their land, their sanctities, and the dignity of Muslims.”
In turn, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories, Muhammad Hussein, said the occupation forces’ attempt to destroy the roof of the mosque’s courtyard is “an attempt to Judaise the place, change its features, structure and external appearance and violate its sanctity.”
He added that this constitutes a “serious attack on the mosque’s landmarks, a provocation to Muslims’ feelings, an attack on freedom of worship there, and portends a dangerous escalation against Palestinian sanctities.”
After the massacre of 29 Palestinian worshippers in 1994 inside the mosque by Jewish extremist 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.
