Dozens of settlers, guarded by intensive police forces, stormed the courtyards of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, on Sunday morning.
Jerusalemite sources reported that 275 settlers stormed the mosque via The Moroccan Gate, carrying out provocative tours in its courtyards, and receiving Talmudic teaching.
It is noteworthy that the settlers daily storm the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque in order to impose the temporal and spatial division of the mosque and to Judaize the Holy city of Jerusalem.
Colonial settlers regularly storm Al-Aqsa under police protection, in an attempt to divide the mosque temporally and spatially.
It is the third holiest site in Islam and also venerated as Judaism’s most holy place, alleged to be the original site of Solomon’s Temple. Disputes surrounding visitation to the site have historically flared tensions in the occupied Palestinian territory.
In 2003, the Israeli government unilaterally decided — despite the objections of the Islamic Endowments Department — to allow non-Muslim visitors into the complex.
Since then, under increasingly right-wing Israeli governments, extremist Jewish settlers have been allowed into the site in ever greater numbers — usually protected by Israeli security forces — while Palestinian access to the site has become increasingly restricted.
The number of Israeli settlers storming the holy site has risen since US president Donald Trump’s declaration of occupied Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Members of the so-called “Temple Mount” movement have been publicly calling its followers to participate in wide scale mass raids on the holy site.
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