The Israeli army Saturday closed the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron to Muslim worshippers, according to the mosque director, Sheikh Hefzy Abu Asinina.
Israel is only allowing settlers to visit the site to mark the Chayei Sarah occasion, Sheikh Hefzy noted this in an interview with the Anadolu Agency (AA).
Abu Asinina said, “the mosque has been closed since 3 p.m. on Friday and will remain closed until 10 p.m. Saturday.”
Hebron’s Old City has been considered among the world’s best-preserved medieval cities, with a number of surviving Mamlūk- and Ottoman-period structures. With the violence following the Six-Day War, however, the Old City centre became a site of confrontation.
The Ibrahim Mosque is one of the oldest historic buildings that exist in the world in terms of its seniority and its sacredness. The holy site is revered by Jews and Muslims as the burial site of religious patriarchs. Jews revere the site as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, while Muslims call it the Ibrahimi Mosque, after the patriarch Abraham.
In 1967, the city fell into the hands of the Israeli occupation. The Israelis created checkpoints around the Ibrahimi mosque. Moreover, the settlers attacks started almost daily to visitors of the mosque and the Israeli occupation army put many restrictions on anyone who wanted to enter.
The Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein created a massacre in the Ibrahimi mosque where dozens of Palestinians were killed inside the mosque during the early Muslim prayer in 1994. Following the massacre, Israel proceeded to impose further restrictions on Palestinians at the mosque and in the city as a whole. It forcibly divided the mosque and created a synagogue with a separate entrance for Jews, shut down vital parts of the city to Palestinian access, and heavily increased military checkpoints for Palestinians.
Due to encroaching policy of occupation, Hebron is turning into two different cities. Area H1 and H2 are increasingly two different towns, divided by physical elements and difference in social classes. The mass departure of the residents that could financially afford to leave the area has transformed the Old city in an almost-empty neighborhood, heavily controlled by the Israeli army and today mainly inhabited by the lowest socio-economic classes of Hebronite society.
The H2 area is additionally fragmented through a “strategy of separation”, including the presence of physical elements such as closures, barriers, settlements and legal strategies of discrimination between Palestinian and Israeli settlers based on national-ethnic criteria.
Palestinians are subject to a system of military law Israel enforces in the West Bank as opposed to Israeli settlers, who are tried under Israeli penal law in courts inside Israel.
Over 200,000 Palestinians live in Hebron, compared with just a few hundred illegal settlers who are not only fully armed but also protected by a massive Israeli army presence.
