Palestine weekly: Violent disruptions from olive groves to Al-Aqsa Mosque

This week’s events offered a glimpse of what the coming autumn may hold for Palestinians: Israeli ministers and settlers asserting themselves at Al-Aqsa Mosque; a pardon granted to a soldier convicted of killing a wounded Palestinian; and a tender advanced for a crucial settlement project timed to close just days before Israelis vote on October 27. As Israeli politicians stake out expansionist and even messianic ambitions during Judaism’s holiest days, attacks, demolitions and closures have continued across the occupied territories — with the consequences likely to extend well beyond the changing of the seasons.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu toured a network of excavation tunnels running beneath Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and the Old City, before joining thousands of settlers for prayers at the Western Wall behind bulletproof glass. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir stormed the mosque compound itself the following morning under heavy police protection; roughly 570 settlers entered to perform religious rituals in violation of the site’s status quo, with more than 450 storming the compound the morning after, according to the news agency Wafa. Jordan’s Foreign Ministry, which holds custodianship over the site, condemned the incursions as an attempt “to impose a temporal and spatial division” of the compound.

The same holiday period saw Israeli forces close the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron to Muslim worshippers from Sunday afternoon until Monday night, while granting settlers free access for holiday celebrations; the mosque’s call to prayer has now been banned for 90 consecutive days.

On September 20, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian man near the illegal Ganim settlement east of Jenin after accusing him of attempting a vehicular attack. Hours earlier, an Israeli settler had been fatally shot near the illegal Halamish settlement; Israeli forces detained a suspect, Qadri Muhammad Samara from Biddu, after violently raiding a hospital where he was receiving treatment after being injured. Soldiers then raided Samara’s home village, where soldiers forced members of three families into a single house and assaulted four men inside, according to local reports.

Ben-Gvir immediately demanded that Samara face the death penalty, calling it the “first case that meets the criteria” of a law the Knesset passed in March — one that permits military courts to sentence to death Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis, but carries no equivalent provision for Israelis convicted of killing Palestinians. Netanyahu ordered the demolition of Samara’s family home and a surge of forces into the West Bank; Israeli forces subsequently sealed all entrances to Ramallah and el-Bireh and conducted a sweeping predawn arrest raid in Biddu on Monday, according to Wafa.

In the same week that Ben-Gvir called for the death penalty, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog expunged the criminal record of Elor Azaria, the soldier convicted in 2017 of manslaughter for shooting dead a wounded, incapacitated Palestinian, Abdul Fattah al-Sharif, in Hebron in 2016. Israel’s own military chief of staff opposed the pardon, noting Azaria “has refrained from expressing remorse… even a decade after his conviction”; Defence Minister Israel Katz welcomed the move as sending “an important message… [that] we do not abandon our fighters.”

Separately, a Palestinian prisoner, Moataz al-Atrash, 21, from Hebron, died this week in Ofer Prison after more than 11 months held under administrative detention without charge; his family said he had no known health problems. The Palestinian Prisoner’s’ Society said the number of confirmed prisoner deaths since October 2023 has now reached 92.

Beyond the killings, settler pogroms continued across the West Bank as security forces stood aside or actively assisted them. Attacks were concentrated in villages like Burqa, near Ramallah, where settlers attacked September 19, then returned the next afternoon to occupy an agricultural structure on the village’s eastern edge, appearing to prepare it for habitation — a possible new illegal outpost in the making.