Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre Impacts Continue 29 Years Later
Yet, 29 years later, the victims are still paying the price for the massacre.
On Friday, 25 February 1994, the 15th day of the holy Muslim fast month of Ramadan, the Jewish terrorist settler, Baruch Goldstein, broke into the Ibrahimi Mosque, also known as Cave of the Patriarchs because it includes shrines and tombs of prophets, located in the southern West Bank city of Hebron (Al-Khalil), as Muslims were performing the dawn prayers on a Ramadan day and opened fire on the worshipers killing 29 on the spot before he was neutralized by the worshippers.
The Israeli occupation soldiers present in the area closed the gates of the mosque to prevent the worshipers from leaving, and they also prevented those coming from outside from entering it to help the wounded.
But the 29 were not the only victims of that massacre. That same day, the occupation soldiers opened fire at Palestinians participating in the funerals of the dead, killing 21 more people.
With tension escalating in the occupied territories, soldiers opened fire at protesters the next day killing 10 more and wounding hundreds of others.
Following the massacre, the occupation forces closed the Ibrahimi Mosque and Hebron’s old city for a full six months, claiming to investigate the crime. They unilaterally formed the Shamgar Commission to investigate the massacre and its causes, which came out at the time with several recommendations, all against the victims and favoring the terrorist settlers.
The recommendations included dividing the Ibrahimi Mosque between Muslims and Jews, creating new facts on the ground that worsened living conditions for the area’s Palestinian residents, tightened security around the holy mosque, giving the occupation authorities full control over the mosque in order to continue to turn into a Jewish shrine, and preventing the call to prayer from its minarets many times during the year as well as closing it for Muslim worshipping many times in the year while opening it fully for only Jewish worship.
Shortly after, the occupation authorities placed cameras and electronic gates at all entrances leading to the mosque area, closed most of the roads leading to it to Muslims, with the exception of one gate with strict military measures, closed the popular vegetable market (al-Hisbeh), the al-Khalil and Shaheen khans, and al-Shuhada and al-Sahla streets. With these measures, the old town was separated from its surroundings, measures that are still in place today and are even harsher. Their impact on the life of the thousands of Palestinians who live in that area is very visible to anyone who goes there.
The terrorist Baruch Goldstein, whose real name was Benjamin Goldstein, was 42 years old when he committed the massacre. He was one of the founders of the Jewish terrorist Kach movement. Goldstein was born in New York, into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family and he got his education at the Jewish yeshiva schools in Brooklyn and got a degree in medicine from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University. He went to occupied Palestine from the United States in 1980 and lived in Kiryat Arba settlement, which was built on usurped Hebron lands and houses the most extreme and racist Israeli settlers.
Source: wafa.ps
