Al-Aqsa Mosque & Sheikh Jarrah

• Recently, Israeli armed forces attacked Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Haram esh-Sharif in Jerusalem, ahead of a march by Zionist nationalists commemorating Israel’s capture of the eastern half of the city in 1967.
• The threatened eviction of dozens of Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrahescalated the crisis further.

Al-Aqsa Mosque:

• It is one of the holiest structures in the Islamic faith. It sits inside a 35-acre site known by Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, and by Jews as the Temple Mount.
• The site is part of the Old City of Jerusalem, sacred to Christians, Jews and Muslims.
• It is believed to have been completed early in the 8^th centuryand faces the Dome of the Rock, the golden-domed Islamic shrine that is a widely recognized symbol of Jerusalem.
• TheUnited Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, has classified the Old City of Jerusalem and its walls as a World Heritage Site.

Sheikh Jarrah Issue:

• Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their homes when the State of Israel was created in historical Palestine in 1948.

• Twenty-eight of those Palestinian families moved to Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem to settle there.
  • In 1956, when East Jerusalem was ruled by Jordan, the Jordanian Ministry of Construction and Development and the UNRelief and Works Agency facilitated the construction of houses for these families in Sheikh Jarrah. But Israel would capture East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967.
• By the early 1970s, Jewish agencies started demanding the families leave the land.
  • Earlier this year (2021),the Central Court in East Jerusalem upheld a decision to evict four Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah in favour of Jewish settlers.
  • The issue remains unresolved and potentially inflammable.