An agreement made in the aftermath of the 1967 war, governing Muslim and Jewish access to pray at Jerusalem’s holy sites, has collapsed under pressure from right wing Jewish extremists backed by the Israeli government.
Arrests of Muslim caretaker staff, bans on access for Muslims, and incursions by radical Jewish groups, at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount in Jerusalem, together with an Israeli police raid during evening prayers on the first night of Ramadan, represent a serious rupture to the agreement, which stipulated that only Muslims were permitted to pray in the sacred compound around the Mosque.
The compound is known as the al-Haram al-Sharif to Muslims, and is considered to be the third holiest site in Islam, after the Great Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. To Jews it is the Temple Mount, the site of the 10th-century BC first temple and the second temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in AD70.
Read the story in the Guardian here.
Picture above: The Al-Qibli Chapel, Part of Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo by Andrew Shiva, 14 November 2013 (cropped). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence.