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Al-Aqsa Mosque: Significance, Access Restrictions, and Repeated Israeli Raids

Every morning, before the first call to prayer echoes across the Old City, Israeli police position themselves at the gates of the Haram al-Sharif — the Noble Sanctuary — to decide who enters and who does not. For the roughly five million Muslims who hold Jordanian-issued entry permits, or who simply live close enough to walk, the right to pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque has become conditional, seasonal, and increasingly contested. For those watching from Gaza or the diaspora, it is largely theoretical.

The compound — 35 acres of limestone plazas, gardens, and monuments at the southeastern corner of Jerusalem’s Old City — contains Al-Aqsa Mosque itself, the Dome of the Rock, and dozens of smaller structures accumulated across fourteen centuries of Islamic stewardship. For Muslims worldwide it is al-Quds, the holy, the third-most sacred site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. Its political and spiritual weight is difficult to overstate, and that weight is precisely why every raid, every restriction, and every settler incursion registers so sharply across the Muslim world.

The Status Quo: A Fragile Architecture of Access

The legal and administrative framework governing the compound is known as the Status Quo — an arrangement with roots in Ottoman-era practice, substantially defined after Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, and reaffirmed in the 1994 Wadi Araba peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. Under that framework, the Islamic Waqf, administered by Jordan, retains custodial authority over the site: it manages the mosques, maintains the grounds, and administers Islamic religious life within the compound. Israel controls external security — the gates, perimeter, and access decisions.

In principle, the arrangement preserves Muslim worship while prohibiting non-Muslim prayer on the esplanade. In practice, scholars and rights groups have documented a sustained pattern of Israeli unilateral action that erodes Waqf authority and narrows Muslim access. Noura Erakat, legal scholar and author of Justice for Some, has argued that Israel’s incrementalism at the site mirrors its broader strategy of “facts on the ground” — each individual measure appearing procedural while the cumulative effect is transformative.

Jordan’s role as custodian was reaffirmed explicitly in the 1994 treaty and is cited regularly by the Jordanian government when protesting Israeli actions at the site. Yet Waqf officials have repeatedly reported being barred from areas of the compound, or finding Israeli police operating inside the mosques themselves during periods of tension.

Raids During Ramadan and the Jewish High Holidays

The most visible ruptures in the Status Quo occur on a near-predictable calendar. Ramadan, when Muslim attendance at Al-Aqsa swells to its annual peak, frequently coincides with the Jewish Passover period — a convergence that has produced some of the compound’s most serious episodes of violence in recent years.

In April 2023, Israeli police conducted raids inside Al-Aqsa Mosque itself during the final days of Ramadan, deploying stun grenades and arresting hundreds of worshippers. OCHA’s Protection of Civilians report for that period documented more than 400 Palestinian arrests at or near the compound over a ten-day window. Video footage circulated widely showing officers moving through the carpeted prayer hall of the mosque, a space the Status Quo has historically treated as under exclusive Waqf jurisdiction.

Similar raids occurred in April 2022, when Israeli forces entered Al-Aqsa on multiple nights during the final third of Ramadan. The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process issued a statement calling for “restraint and respect for the historic Status Quo.” The raids drew condemnation from Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab League, and contributed to a significant escalation of violence across the West Bank and Gaza in the weeks that followed.

Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and imam of Al-Aqsa Mosque, has consistently described these raids as deliberate provocations calibrated to coincide with high-attendance worship periods. “They do not come at three in the morning when the mosque is empty,” he told Middle East Eye in 2022. “They come when it is full.” Sheikh Sabri has served as one of the most prominent Palestinian voices documenting and protesting Israeli conduct at the site for more than two decades.

Settler Incursions and the ‘Temple Mount’ Movement

Parallel to the police raids is a phenomenon that has grown substantially since the early 2010s: organized visits to the Haram al-Sharif by Jewish nationalists asserting a right to pray on the esplanade — in direct contravention of the Status Quo’s prohibition on non-Muslim prayer at the site.

Israeli police data, reported by Israeli outlets including Haaretz, shows that settler and nationalist incursions into the compound have increased year on year. In 2023, Israeli groups entered the compound on more than 16,000 separate occasions, a figure that represents a significant increase from the roughly 4,000 recorded annually a decade earlier. Many of these visits are organized by groups associated with the Jewish Temple movement, which advocates construction of a Jewish temple on the site.

The political context has intensified under successive Israeli governments that have included ministers openly affiliated with the Temple movement. Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was appointed National Security Minister in December 2022 and was given authority over Israeli police, visited the compound himself in January 2023 — a move condemned by the United States, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority. The State Department described it as “provocative.” Jordan’s foreign minister called it a “flagrant violation” of international law and the Status Quo.

For Palestinian worshippers, the incursions are experienced not as abstract political gestures but as an intrusion into a lived and sacred space. Al-Haq, the Ramallah-based human rights organization, has documented cases of Palestinian worshippers being physically separated from settler groups by Israeli police during simultaneous presence on the esplanade — a spatial logic that, critics argue, normalizes settler access at the expense of Muslim worshippers’ experience of the site.

Access Restrictions as a Structural Condition

Beyond the episodic violence of raid seasons, access to Al-Aqsa is governed by a matrix of permanent restrictions that fall disproportionately on Palestinians. Since 1967, Israel has exercised control over who may enter East Jerusalem. Palestinians from the West Bank require a permit to enter the city; those from Gaza are almost entirely barred. OCHA has documented how these movement restrictions effectively exclude the majority of Palestinians living under Israeli control from reaching the site at all.

During periods of heightened tension, Israel imposes age-based restrictions — barring men under 40 or under 50 from entering the compound — that have no basis in the Status Quo framework and are implemented unilaterally. UNRWA and human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch have criticized these restrictions as collective punishment targeting the Muslim population.

The cumulative picture is one of a site whose formal custodial arrangements remain nominally intact while the conditions of access are reshaped, year by year, in ways that expand Israeli physical presence and reduce Palestinian freedom of worship. For Sheikh Sabri, for the Waqf officials managing the compound under increasing pressure, and for the Palestinian families who have prayed at Al-Aqsa across generations, the question is no longer whether the Status Quo is under pressure. It is whether enough of it will survive to be worth preserving.

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