HEBRON, February 9, 2026 (WAFA) – Israeli occupation forces on Monday evening closed a-Shuhada Street in the Old City of Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank, according to WAFA correspondent.
He reported that the occupying forces blocked the street, denying Palestinian inhabitants access to the street to reach their houses.
Twenty-six years ago, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein, a US-born settler living at Kiryat Arba colony, broke into the Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire at Palestinian Muslim worshippers, killing 29 and wounding another 125. Four Palestinians were killed on the same day in the clashes that broke out around the Mosque in response to the massacre.
Dozens more Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military in the protests and rioting that followed. Palestinians are still barred from accessing a-Shuhada Street, the main approach to the mosque.
In the aftermath, the prayer hall of the mosque, known to Jews as Tomb of the Patriarchs, was formally partitioned, with two-thirds of the space reserved for Jews and the remaining third for Palestinian Muslims.
In 1997, the Hebron Protocol divided the city into two further administrative zones: H1 and H2. The mosque is in H2, which puts it under Israeli military control. But the management of the mosque itself remained with the Islamic waqf (trust) and the Hebron Municipality.
However, on 30 December, the Israeli Civil Administration, the name Israel gives to the body administering its military occupation of the West Bank, unilaterally seized municipal control of the mosque’s central courtyard from the Hebron Municipality and transferred it to the religious council of Kiryat Arba colony, marking the first major shift in the status of the mosque.
On February 8, the Israeli occupation authorities approved sweeping changes to land registration and civil control in the occupied West Bank. This move envisages transferring planning, licensing, and construction powers in Hebron from the Palestinian municipality to the occupation forces, expanding control over building permits, development, resources, and security. This new policy affects the Ibrahimi Mosque.
In 2017, UNESCO designated the Ibrahimi Mosque and the surrounding Old City of Hebron as an endangered World Heritage Site belonging to the State of Palestine.
Israel uses the Jewish nationalist name “Judea and Samaria” to refer to the occupied West Bank to reinforce its bogus claims to the territory and to give them a veneer of historical and religious legitimacy.
Such Israeli measures, taken under the guise of security, are intended to advance the de facto annexation and entrench Israel’s 58-year-old military occupation of the West Bank and its settler colonial project, which it enforces with routine and frequently deadly violence against Palestinians.
K.F.
