NEW YORK (Dispatches) – United Nation’s Security Council members voiced concern and stressed the need to maintain the status quo at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Al-Quds, but did not commit to any action days after the Zionist regime’s new far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made a controversial visit to the site, which Palestinian leaders called “an unprecedented provocation”.
The decades-old status quo at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound allows only Muslim worship at the site, which is Islam’s third-holiest after Mecca and Medina.
But the site is also revered by Jews, who call it the Temple Mount. The Zionist regime’s far-right groups have long attempted to change the status quo and allow Jewish prayer at the site.
Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour pushed for the Security Council on Thursday to take action against the regime over Ben-Gvir’s provocative actions. The occupying regime’s new minister is well known for racist incitement against Arabs, opposition to Palestinian statehood, and for leading raids by settlers into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Al-Quds.
“What red line does Israel need to cross for the Security Council to finally say, enough is enough?” Mansour asked the 15-member council, saying the regime is showing “absolute contempt”.
Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political bureau of the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement, has called upon Muslim leaders to rise up and defend Al-Aqsa Mosque against the dangerous plots of Israel’s most far-right cabinet in history.
Haniyeh called for immediate and effective measures to safeguard Al-Aqsa Mosque and stop incursions and sinister plans of Zionist occupiers.
Back in October 2021, a Zionist court upheld a ban on Jewish prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, after an earlier lower court’s decision stirred outrage among Palestinians and across the Muslim world.
Judge of the district court in Al-Quds Aryeh Romanov on October 8 confirmed that Jews are barred from worshiping openly at the site and only Muslims are permitted to pray there.
In May 2021, frequent acts of violence against Palestinian worshipers at al-Aqsa led to an 11-day war between Palestinian resistance groups in the besieged Gaza Strip and the Zionist regime, during which the regime killed at least 260 Palestinians, including 66 children.
Palestinians want the occupied West Bank as part of their future independent state and view Al-Quds’ eastern sector as the capital of their future sovereign state.