UN Archives - CrossFireArarbia

57th Year of Al Aqsa Burning: ‘The Fire Continues’ Ekrima Sabri Warns

CrossFireArabia
August 20, 2026

The ex-Mufti of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, affirmed that the fire that engulfed the mosque in 1969 has not been extinguished, for it continues till this day, with its scope expanding, targeting the entire city of Jerusalem, its geography, demographics, and its Arab and Islamic identity.

On the anniversary of the Al-Aqsa fire, which falls on Friday, Sheikh Sabri explained to Sanad News that the flames that consumed parts of the Qibli prayer hall 57 years ago are now taking on more complex forms through systematic Israeli policies targeting the Palestinian presence, tightening the noose around its residents, and threatening homes with demolition to forcibly impose a new reality.

He pointed out that what is happening in the neighborhoods and areas surrounding the mosque is a direct continuation of that historic fire, adding: “In 1969, the flames were visible inside the mosque, but today the fire is wider; we see it in the homes threatened with demolition, in the families facing displacement, and in the attempts to change the face of Jerusalem.”

He explained the danger does not stop at home threatened here and there, or a family being targeted. He said today “every Jerusalemite home is being threatened with demolition and every family is threatened with displacement..”

He stressed the Al-Aqsa Mosque is not merely a building separate from its surroundings, but it is an integral part of the city’s history, and that targeting the surrounding towns is a direct attack on its status and identity.

Sheikh Sabri warned against treating the anniversary of the fire as just a historical event to be commemorated once a year. He emphasized that the essence of the crime remains present and ongoing as long as there are Israeli dangers that threaten the holy sites and the city.

He said the Palestinian people and the Arab and Islamic nations must keep the issue of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa active in their consciousness and actions, and not to allow the ongoing attacks to become normative or accepted as facts on-the-ground.

“That fire which has since been consuming the Arab identity of the city and the mosque will only be extinguished by the will and steadfastness of the Palestinian people. Fire can burn stone, but it cannot burn the identity of Al-Aqsa, the memory of Jerusalem, or the will of a people clinging to their land.”

On 21 August, 1969, the Australian extremist Denis Michael Rohan stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound through the Al-Ghawanimah Gate and set fire to the Qibli prayer hall. The fire consumed a large part of the mosque, including the pulpit of Saladin, which holds immense historical and cultural value.

Despite attempts by the Israeli occupation authorities at the time to provide an excuse for the crime and claim the fire was caused by an electrical short circuit, technical and engineering reports prepared by Arab engineers definitively proved it was deliberate and premeditated.

That incident sparked widespread international condemnation, with the UN Security Council issuing a resolution condemning it. It also ignited widespread anger in the Arab and Muslim worlds, leading to the establishment of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation).

Rehabilitation and restoration work on the Qibli prayer hall began a year after the fire and continued until 1986, while a temporary iron pulpit remained in the mosque until 2006, when a new pulpit was installed that was exactly identical to the historical pulpit that was set on fire.

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UN: Humanitarian Access Blocked by 900 Israeli Checkpoints

CrossFireArabia
August 14, 2026

Humanitarian operations in the occupied West Bank are being delayed and restricted by a network of more than 900 physical obstacles, including checkpoints, gates and roadblocks, the UN said Friday.

Daniela Gross De Almeida, an associate spokesperson, told reporters that the restrictions are limiting humanitarian access and leaving people in need without adequate assistance.

“Our humanitarian partners warn that aid work is being delayed and limited by a network of over 900 physical obstacles including checkpoints, gates, roadblocks, and other restrictions. This hinders humanitarian access and leaves people in need underserved,” De Almeida said.

In the village of Qusra, near Nablus, aid and municipal workers have been unable to reach three Palestinian families who have been trapped in their homes since Tuesday, she said, adding that the families became isolated following the establishment of a settlement outpost near their homes and tightened access restrictions in the area.

“Our colleagues warn that efforts to protect Palestinians have been ineffective, with settlers reportedly reinstalling a tent that Israeli forces had dismantled yesterday,” she said.

Turning to Gaza, she said humanitarians continue to provide vital aid to people in the besieged Strip, despite persistent insecurity and restrictions.

“Last week, we and our partners mobilized rapid support for people who had lost their shelters or were displaced again due to attacks, domestic fires, and other incidents. In more than a dozen reported incidents, people were displaced and lost their belongings due to attacks, impacting nearly 290 households,” she said. Anadolu

Uncategorized

Israeli Settler Violence Reach ‘All Time High’

CrossFireArabia
August 2, 2026

Violence in the occupied West Bank is worsening as the Israeli Government continues to approve new settlements while settlers and Israeli security forces have “often” acted together to attack local Palestinian communities, the UN’s human rights office (OHCHR) warned on Wednesday.

As of 20 July, the agency reports that 18 Palestinians have died this year in attacks involving settlers. Twelve died at the hands of settlers, three by Israeli forces and responsibility for the remaining three deaths is disputed.

Since Friday, eight Palestinians, including a boy, and two members of the Israeli military have also been killed in the region.

The number of settler attacks has increased each year since 2023 following the brutal Hamas attacks on southern Israeli communities, rising to 1,835 last year, according to the UN’s humanitarian aid office (OCHA).

There were about 190 attacks per month in the first four months of 2026, putting the West Bank on a trajectory to reach more than 2,000 attacks by the end of the year.

Alongside security forces, Israeli settlers in the West Bank, with financial incentives from the government, frequently attack families, burn mosques and destroy and confiscate property, OHCHR reported.

Movement restrictions preventing Palestinians from accessing essential services are now tighter than ever, the office added.

“We are alarmed by the Israeli Government’s announcement to further increase the number of settlements and outposts and open calls by Israeli leaders for revenge and collective punishment against Palestinian communities, accompanied by threats to turn the West Bank into another Gaza,” OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said.

Two-State solution must remain

Speaking from Jerusalem on Friday, UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Ramiz Alakbarov called the continued loss of life in the West Bank “deeply alarming”, urging Israel to hold perpetrators accountable and all actors to pursue a two-state solution.

“There is no military or violent solution to this conflict,” Mr. Alakbarov said.

In September, the General Assembly endorsed the New York Declaration, calling for a two-State solution, though Israel and the US voted against it.

The escalating violence in the West Bank comes two years after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in an advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank since 1967 is illegal and that countries should not recognise Israel’s actions related to the occupation. Israel quickly condemned the ruling.

Briefing the Security Council in New York on Tuesday, Mr. Alakbarov noted that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently announced the approval of several new settlements, which the peace coordinator called “illegal under international law”.

“I call upon all parties to take urgent steps to reverse the dangerous trajectory in the West Bank,” he said.

On Monday, Israeli troops forcibly entered a UN facility in East Jerusalem where hundreds of Palestinian refugees receive free vocational training each year. The UN and its partners in the occupied territories condemned the action, which violates international law.

Call to end occupation

OHCHR’s Ms. Shamdasani reiterated on Wednesday the UN’s call for countries to work together to “bring an end to the Israeli occupation” of the West Bank.

“With attacks by Israeli settlers, and the creation of settlements and outposts hitting an all-time high, third States must act urgently and in unison to halt the continuing killing and dispossession of the Palestinian people,” she said. UN News

News

Israel Slams Detention Order on Palestinian Prisoner Who Spent 12 Years in Jail

marwan
July 30, 2026

Israeli authorities issued a six-month administrative detention order against a Palestinian prisoner on the day he was scheduled to be released after spending more than 12 years in prison, the Palestinian Prisoner Society said Thursday.

In a statement, the nongovernmental group said Israeli intelligence issued the order against Mohammad Ahmad Abdel Wahab al-Madani, 32, from Askar refugee camp east of Nablus in the northern West Bank, after he completed his sentence.

Israel uses administrative detention to hold Palestinians without charge or trial, based on classified files, with detention orders renewable for repeated periods.

Al-Madani had been due to complete his original 12-year jail sentence on May 30, 2026, the society said.

Israeli authorities brought another case against him during his detention, extending his sentence by two additional months and imposing a fine, it added.

Al-Madani’s family went Wednesday to a military checkpoint to welcome him back, before his lawyer informed them that Israeli authorities had issued a six-month administrative detention order, preventing his release, the group said.

The society said al-Madani’s case “is not an exceptional case,” but falls within an Israeli policy that has seen an “unprecedented expansion” in the use of administrative detention against Palestinians, especially since the start of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza in October 2023.

According to the organization, the number of new and renewed administrative detention orders has exceeded 20,000 since the start of the Gazawar, while the number of administrative detainees reached 3,244 by early July.

Israeli authorities did not exclude children, women, the elderly, the sick or the wounded from administrative detention, the group said.

It noted that 180 children were held under administrative detention by the end of last year, while dozens of women have been subjected to the measure since the start of the war.

The society called on the international community, the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross to act urgently to pressure Israel to end its administrative detention policy and release administrative detainees.

Israel holds around 9,400 Palestinian prisoners, including 94 women, more than 350 children, 3,244 administrative detainees and 1,320 people it classifies as “unlawful combatants,” according to Palestinian figures.

Palestinian and Israeli rights groups say prisoners face torture, starvation and medical neglect, leading to the deaths of dozens. Anadolu

Uncategorized

Pain of Gaza is a ‘Non-stop’ Israeli Stain

CrossFireArabia
July 29, 2026

By Ramzy Baroud

The words “killed”, “injured”, “maimed” and the like often lose a great part of their meaning when they are repeated so relentlessly.

Take, for example, a headline like: “13 Palestinians Killed in Gaza, Others Wounded.” Though many of us can still feel a deep sense of sadness over such a tragedy, the news itself becomes less shocking over time.

According to figures produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Israel has killed and wounded a total of over 250,000 Palestinians since the start of the genocide in 2023.

The tally is updated daily because the killing never stops.

On July 23, six Palestinians were killed in Gaza. A day earlier, 13 were killed and the day before that, nine others were killed and so on.

It is this “and so on” that makes us lose our sense, over time, of what these tragedies actually entail. These are innocent people who are burned alive in their tents, bombed in their cars, or killed while attempting to enjoy a brief moment of respite from the scorching heat on the beach.

Among the nine killed on July 21, an entire family, including four young children, was wiped out in a single strike. As reports of Israel’s daily harvest of Palestinian lives in Gaza multiply, journalists too often neglect to humanize those killed.

A photo circulating on social media showed three of those children: A boy wearing a T-shirt that read “Santa Monica Beach”; his bespectacled sister in a pink shirt, proudly holding a certificate of achievement from her school; and their youngest sister, posing gently.

These three represent every single Palestinian child killed since the start of this genocide. According to UN and international estimates, over 21,000 children have been killed in Gaza, with tens of thousands more maimed or buried under the rubble.

Though the daily routine of killing makes the tragedy feel less shocking for those merely hearing the numbers, it becomes infinitely more tragic for those who must bear it directly. In Gaza, not a single family has been spared the loss of loved ones, making the grief compound day after day.

There are no words to describe the collective pain of Gaza.

What makes the tragedy even more unbearable is that the entire world knows what has transpired and continues to transpire in Gaza, yet fails to do anything about it. We keep track of the numbers, we point to Israel’s barbarity, we decry the failure of international institutions, and we shake our heads in despair.

Yet, the outcome remains unchanged: the death toll rises, and new statistics are generated daily to remind us of the magnitude of the crisis.

A July 23 joint report by the FAO, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme found that 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza face acute food insecurity.

The report also warned that more than 74,000 children under five are expected to require urgent treatment for acute malnutrition over the coming year.

This report was released on the same day that Gaza health authorities updated the official death toll to over 73,311 Palestinians. That number is already higher now, as more have been killed since.

On that same day, Thameen Al Kheetan of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stated that “no place in Gaza can be considered safe”.

That statement is true, of course, but it is also the most well-known fact in the world right now. No one is contesting it. And yet, no one acts: Israel keeps bombing, the US Congress continues assigning it more weapons, and the rest of the world tracks the death tally.

Meanwhile, Israel—which has seized control of even more territory in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire—is now constructing massive earth barriers stretching an estimated 23 kilometers across the Strip.

Though it was never fair to begin with, even the original Trump Gaza plan never mentioned the building of interior borders, the theft of additional land, or the concentration of displaced Palestinians into tiny enclaves within an already small piece of land.

Israel’s long-term plan is not only to maintain permanent military control over Gaza, as top Israeli officials have declared, but also to prolong its torment indefinitely.

Even as I write this article, news reports indicate that four more Palestinians have just been killed. It is unlikely the number will remain that low; the Israeli army rarely kills in small numbers.

But even these small numbers represent human beings whose grief cannot be measured in statistics, summed up in official statements, or reduced to clichéd headlines.

Nor do survivors cling to the empty promise of international law prevailing over US-backed impunity. History has made Palestinians cynical. For generations, through every massacre and land theft since the 1948 Nakba, waiting for justice has yielded nothing but hollow promises and rising body counts.

The only difference between the past and the present is that today, we all know, see, and hear exactly what is happening in Gaza and across Palestine.

The very least we can do is refuse to turn our backs or reduce the genocide before our eyes to numbers.

If we allow that to happen, we become culpable, too: Israel does the killing, using American arms, while we sit by, counting the dead and shaking our heads at the sad state of the world.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, “Before the Flood”, was published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include “Our Vision for Liberation”, “My Father was a Freedom Fighter” and “The Last Earth”. Baroud is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). He contributed this article to The Jordan Times