Israel just handed ownership of a historic mosque in Hebron to Jewish settlers. Here’s what that means.

In the latest Israeli move to impose its annexation of the West Bank, the Israeli army’s central command transferred the administrative authorities over the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron from the Palestinian city’s municipality to the Religious Council of the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba’ last week.

Until the latest Israeli decision, the Ibrahimi mosque was run by the Hebron municipality for the maintenance of infrastructure as a Palestinian historical site, and by the Palestinian religious endowments department, or the Awqaf, for the religious staff and the administration of the Mosque. The Awqaf department is part of the Palestinian Authority, and it is the institution that safeguards the religious character of holy sites and their associated religious rights.

When the Awqaf’s authority is revoked over any location, it is no longer considered a Palestinian religious site — and could be given over to another usage, like a tourist attraction. But when the Awqaf’s authority is revoked by Israeli authorities, it is part of a project to Judaize, and therefore Israelize, the site. In other words, Israel seeks to erase the Palestinian character of the site and limit or completely block Palestinians’ access to it.

This latest Israeli measure to wrest the Ibrahimi Mosque from the Awqaf essentially exposes the Mosque to Israeli seizure, because it removes the religious character of the site’s ownership, which has historically been the most important layer of protection against colonial confiscation. This is why the main religious sites in the Old Cities of Hebron and Jerusalem are among the few remaining public spaces where Palestinians can gather and collectively express themselves through religious practice.

Instrumentalizing religion for colonization

Far from a strictly religious matter, changing the legal authority governing these sites from the Islamic Waqf to the Kiryat Arba’ Religious Council is tantamount to announcing their seizure by Israel. It is an instrumentalization of religion to advance settler control and diminish Palestinians’ presence in key locations.

This unprecedented move has transpired with barely any adequate coverage in the press, despite the fact that the Ibrahimi Mosque, after the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, has been at the heart of political tensions for decades, holding a multi-religious and centuries-old tradition of being the burial place of the Biblical and Quranic figure of the Prophet Abraham and his family. Mentioned by Flavius Josephus in the first century CE as “a cave,” the location became the site of a Byzantine church in the fourth century, and then the same building was used as a mosque from the seventh century. The site was rarely a subject of conflict throughout this vast expanse of time — until Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967.

The Kiryat Arba’ settlement was established in the 1970s as a response by the Israeli government to Israeli settlers’ attempts to settle in Hebron. The idea was to give these settlers, who were mostly from the messianic religious Zionist movement, a place in Hebron to settle outside of the city’s Old Town. But hundreds of settlers moved to the Old Town anyway, followed by thousands of Israeli troops. They turned it and the Ibrahimi Mosque into a permanent point of tension between Palestinians and Israeli religious settlers.

In February 1994, Brooklyn-born Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, broke into the Ibrahimi Mosque during the dawn prayer on a Ramadan day and shot dead 29 Palestinian worshipers. The massacre triggered a series of riots in the city, at the end of which the Israeli army handed part of the mosque to Israeli settlers, who turned it into a synagogue. Ever since, the Ibrahimi Mosque has been physically divided.

The model for dividing the sacred religious site raised alarms among Palestinians, who believed that Israel planned to do the same to other religious sites, especially the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, over which some Israelis believe that the Second Temple once stood. When Ariel Sharon stormed the al-Aqsa compound in September 2000, accompanied by hundreds of Israeli riot police, he was appealing to the Israeli religious settler right for votes ahead of the elections that he won the following year. Today, religious right-wing Israeli leaders continue to use the same strategy to amass the support of the same voting sector. Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has led the settler stormings into al-Aqsa since 2021, calling explicitly for the destruction of the third holiest site for nearly two billion Muslims, and rebuilding a Third Temple in its place.

In May 2021, Israeli police stormed al-Aqsa during Ramadan prayers, firing rubber bullets and tear gas at worshipers during the religious services in order to remove them from the mosque, injuring hundreds. These events, alongside the attempt by an Israeli court to expel Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, triggered a wave of protests in the holy city that expanded across all of historic Palestine in the Unity Intifada. 

The Israeli counterattack

Since October 2023, settler raids of the al-Aqsa compound have become so repetitive that the Islamic endowments department in Jerusalem reported in early July that 33,000 Israeli settlers had stormed al-Aqsa since the beginning of the year. Earlier last weekend, the Israeli minister for Jerusalem and Heritage, Meir Porush, signed his last order to confiscate multiple Palestinian properties in the surroundings of the al-Aqsa compound shortly before resigning from his position.

Sheikh Omar Kiswani of the al-Aqsa Mosque told Mondoweiss that the Islamic endowments, or the awqaf, in Jerusalem remained dependent on the Jordanian endowments department after the 1967 occupation, and continue to be to this day. In Hebron, however, as in the rest of Palestine, the Islamic endowments depend on the Palestinian Authority.” 

“This means that the status of Al-Aqsa as an Islamic site, under the Heshemite Jordanian guardianship, is part of the historic status quo that supposedly cannot be changed until negotiations over Jerusalem reach a breakthrough,” Sheikh Kiswani explained.

“The status of all religious sites in Palestine is also part of the status quo, and the rights of Palestinian Muslims and Christians are safeguarded and uncontroversial, but the Israeli authorities use religion to achieve political gains, risking triggering more religious tensions which can get out of control,” Kiswani added.

As Israel continues to wage its war on Gaza, it accelerates its efforts to annex the West Bank. Along with settlement expansion and land confiscation, and restriction of movement of Palestinians, the imposition of control over religious sites comes as part of the overall logic of annexation, where religious extremist settlers are used as frontline tools of Israeli state strategy.

In different times and conditions, such a move would have triggered a worldwide controversy. But in the midst of international inaction towards the starvation of two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the lack of a reaction to Israel’s handing over of a crucial holy site like the Ibrahimi Mosque to illegal settlers barely warrants notice in comparison. Yet these changes stand to change the face of Palestinians’ relationship to their most venerated places of worship, all the same.

Qassam Muaddi
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter/X at @QassaMMuaddi.