Hamas decries an Israeli court’s decision to give Israeli settlers more excuses to storm the al-Aqsa Mosque’s compound by granting them the right to “perform silent prayers” on the site.
Speaking on Wednesday, the Palestinian resistance movement’s spokesman, Hazem Qassem, said the decision “constitutes a flagrant aggression against al-Aqsa Mosque.”
The ruling, he added, also amounted to “a step on the path of the temporal and spatial division of the mosque, which is a flagrant violation of all human laws and norms.”
Earlier, the judge at the Magistrates Court in the holy occupied city of al-Quds, Bilha Yahalom, said that the alleged form of prayer “cannot be considered a ‘criminal act.’”
The compound, Islam’s third-holiest site, is located in the Old City of East al-Quds, which the Israeli regime occupied as part of the entire Palestinian territory of the West Bank during a war in 1967.
The regime has been dotting the territory with hundreds of illegal settlements ever since the occupation.
Israeli settlers already storm the mosque’s compound at least twice every day under full protection of the regime’s forces.