On September 4, 2024, Israeli settlers held a concert at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, which banned entry to Palestinians. Director Moataz Abu Sneineh was condemning the violation.

In a video that went viral on social media platforms, Israeli soldiers could be seen permitting settlers to move some musical instruments into the Mosque. The footage, seemingly captured by an Israeli settler or soldier, shows soldiers facilitating the moving of some materials inside the place of worship. The Mosque’s director, Moataz Abu Sneineh, said the settlers conducted “a concert inside the Mosque courtyards in a flagrant assault against the places of worship and privacy of Muslims.” 

“These practices and violations fall within the framework of exchanging roles with the colonists, as the occupation forces allowed them to bring in musical instruments and loudspeakers as part of imposing complete control over the mosque and its surroundings at a time when Palestinians are not allowed to bring in the necessary supplies for the Mosque for maintenance and restoration,” he told the official news agency Wafa.

Wafa reported that the Mosque was opened to Palestinian worshippers early on Tuesday. The Ibrahimi Mosque is of immense importance to Muslims, who believe it was built above the tomb of Prophet Ibrahim—-Abraham. After a massacre in 1994 that claimed the lives of 29 Palestinian worshippers at the hands of a Jewish extremist settler, Baruch Goldstein, inside the Mosque, Israeli authorities divided the Mosque’s complex between Muslim and Jewish worshippers.

In July 2017, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee voted to declare the Ibrahimi Mosque and the old city of Hebron a World Heritage site. The city has about 220,000 Palestinians and roughly 500 illegal Israeli settlers. The latter live in a series of Jewish-only enclaves heavily guarded by Israeli soldiers.

Tensions have been running high across the occupied West Bank since a deadly Israeli offensive killed nearly 40,800 people in Gaza on October 7 last year. At least 682 people have since been killed, and more than 5,700 others injured by Israeli fire in the occupied territory, according to Palestinian figures.

In a historic ruling on July 19, the International Court of Justice said that the decades-long Israeli occupation was “illegal” and called for the withdrawal of all existing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.