World News

For the first time since 1967, al-Aqsa mosque – Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site – was closed at the end of Ramadan on Friday, with tensions rising among Palestinians as Israeli authorities keep the complex shut, forcing worshippers to hold Eid prayers as close as they could to the sealed site.

On Friday morning, hundreds of worshippers were forced to pray outside the Old City, as Israeli police barricaded the entrances to the site.

Because of security concerns related to the US-Israeli war on Iran, on 28 February Israeli authorities had in effect sealed off the mosque complex in Jerusalem to most Muslim worshippers during Ramadan. Officials framed the move as a security measure linked to the escalating confrontation with Iran, leaving thousands of Palestinians to gather and pray outside the gates of the Old City instead.

However, Palestinians say the move is part of a wider Israeli strategy to leverage security tensions to tighten restrictions and entrench control over the al-Aqsa mosque complex, known as al-Haram al-Sharif to Muslims, which also encompasses the seventh-century Dome of the Rock Islamic shrine. To Jews it is the Temple Mount, the site of the 10th-century BC first temple and second temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in AD70.