RAMALLAH, Palestine/ISTANBUL 

Palestine called on the UN culture and education agency UNESCO on Wednesday to take “immediate and urgent” action to protect the Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque following Israel’s seizure of the shrine’s roof.

Ali Abu Zuhri, who heads the National Committee for Tangible and Intangible Heritage, urged UNESCO “to prevent this grave assault, and take practical and concrete steps to safeguard the Ibrahimi Mosque and protect it from alteration and distortion.”

He said the Israeli seizure of the mosque’s roof “constitutes a blatant assault on the character of this historic and human site, which is inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.”

The measure, Abu Zuhri said, “is a continuation of occupation policies aimed at Judaizing the Ibrahimi Mosque, erasing its Islamic and Arab identity, and imposing new facts that directly contradict international law and conventions for the protection of cultural heritage.”

Abu Zuhri called on the international community to pressure Israel “to stop its systematic violations against Palestinian and Islamic heritage, and to send an international fact-finding mission to inspect the violations taking place at the Ibrahimi Mosque.”

Earlier this week, Israel ordered the takeover of the roof of the inner courtyard at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, a move Palestinian officials say was the latest step to erode Muslim authority over one of the West Bank’s most sensitive holy sites.

The Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) said the order, covering 288 square meters, was issued on Monday through a formal expropriation notice.

In February, Israel Hayom newspaper reported that Israel had already shifted administrative powers over the mosque from the Palestinian Ministry of Endowments and Hebron’s municipality to an illegal settler religious body in Kiryat Arba.

In 2017, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee recognized the Ibrahimi Mosque as a Palestinian heritage site.

The mosque lies in Hebron’s Old City, where some 400 illegal settlers live under the guard of about 1,500 soldiers.

In 1994, Israel divided the mosque after an illegal Israeli settler gunned down 29 Palestinian worshippers, allocating roughly two-thirds of the site to Jewish worship and the remainder to Muslims.

Since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, at least 1,022 Palestinians have been killed and more than 7,000 injured in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces and illegal settlers, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

In a landmark opinion last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal. It demanded the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.