Al Jazeera: Two Palestinians Killed as Protests Erupt Over Israel's Indefinite Closure of Holy Sepulchre and Al-Aqsa

AL JAZEERA Middle East | Israel-Palestine | Jerusalem 17 April 2027

Two Palestinians Killed as Protests Erupt Over Jerusalem Holy Site Closures

Israel orders indefinite shutdown of Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, citing ‘structural renovation’. Thousands flood the Old City. Clashes spread through the night. Among the dead: a schoolteacher from Beit Jala.

JERUSALEM — Two Palestinians were killed and at least sixty-three injured on Friday after Israeli security forces clashed with protesters who had gathered in and around Jerusalem’s Old City in response to the government’s announcement that it was imposing an indefinite closure of both the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

The Israeli government announced the closures in the early hours of Friday morning in a joint statement from the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs and Jewish Renewal, citing what it described as a “comprehensive structural renovation and archaeological stabilisation programme” made necessary by subsidence and seismic risk identified in recent engineering surveys. No engineering reports were made public. No renovation contractor was named. No timeline for reopening was given.

Israeli police established cordons around both sites before dawn — before the first arrivals for Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa and before the morning Mass at the Holy Sepulchre. By mid-morning, tens of thousands of people had converged on the Old City. By afternoon, clashes had broken out at Damascus Gate, Lions’ Gate, and along the Via Dolorosa. By nightfall, two people were dead.

Both were Palestinian Christians.

The Dead

Mariam Qassis, 54, was a Jerusalem resident whose family has lived in the city for generations. She was a seamstress. Her daughter told Al Jazeera she had gone to the Holy Sepulchre that morning as she did every Friday — it was her habit, her daughter said, regardless of weather or circumstance — and was turned away at the cordon. She joined the crowd that gathered outside Damascus Gate. She was struck by a rubber-coated steel bullet at close range and died at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem at 4:17 p.m. She is survived by three children and seven grandchildren.

Georges Haddad, 71, was from Beit Jala, a predominantly Christian town southwest of Bethlehem. His son, Yousef, told Al Jazeera by telephone that his father had travelled to Jerusalem that morning specifically because of the closure — that he had heard the news before dawn and said he needed to go and see for himself. Yousef said he tried to talk his father out of making the journey.

Georges Haddad was killed near the Jaffa Gate in circumstances that remain disputed. Israeli police say he was caught in a crowd that was throwing stones and that officers responded to an imminent threat. Witnesses at the scene told Al Jazeera he was standing at the edge of the crowd, not throwing anything, and was struck by live ammunition. He was 71 years old. He had been a schoolteacher. He taught mathematics for 38 years in Beit Jala.

His son Yousef said he was informed by the hospital that his father was found holding his rosary when he was brought in.

“He went to pray,” Yousef said. “They closed the church. He went anyway. That was my father.”

The Closure

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is, for the majority of Christians worldwide, the holiest site on earth — the traditional location of the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It has operated continuously as a place of Christian worship for seventeen centuries, under Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, British, Jordanian, and Israeli authority in succession. Its administration is shared among six Christian denominations under a centuries-old arrangement known as the Status Quo. The keys to the church have been held, since 1187, by two Muslim families — the Joudeh and Nuseibeh — an arrangement established by Saladin to prevent inter-denominational conflict over custody.

On Friday morning, Israeli police informed the Joudeh family representative that he was not permitted to approach the building. He was escorted from the cordon.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound — Haram al-Sharif — covers thirty-five acres atop what Jews call the Temple Mount. It is the third-holiest site in Islam and the holiest location in Judaism. Under arrangements in place since 1967, Israel has maintained security control while Jordan’s Islamic Waqf has administered the compound’s day-to-day operations. The current coalition government has since 2024 progressively expanded Israeli state authority within the compound through a series of ministerial orders, reducing Waqf administrative authority and expanding visiting hours for non-Muslim Israelis. Friday’s closure is a categorically different action: a complete exclusion of all worshippers, clergy, tourists, and Waqf administrators, enforced by Israeli police, with no stated end date.

No structural emergency at either site had been reported or flagged by any independent engineering body, heritage organisation, or religious authority prior to the announcement. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee, which monitors both sites as part of the Old City of Jerusalem listing, said it had received no notification of any planned works and had not been consulted.

“We were given no warning,” UNESCO Director-General Delphine Méchin said in a statement Friday. “We are seeking urgent clarification.”

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs said clarification would be provided “through appropriate diplomatic channels in due course.”

The Crowds

By 9 a.m. the streets of the Old City were filled beyond their ordinary capacity. People had come from across Jerusalem, from Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus. They came on foot when vehicles were stopped at checkpoints. They came through alleys and secondary routes when main roads were blocked. They were Muslims and Christians. Old women with prayer beads and young men in football shirts and priests in full vestments and nuns and families with children. They stood outside the cordons and looked at the closed doors.

For a time, it was peaceful. People prayed in the streets outside the gates, on the stones, in the alleys. A group of Catholic nuns knelt on the Via Dolorosa and said the rosary together. Outside the Al-Aqsa gates, rows of men spread prayer mats on the paving stones and prayed the Friday prayer facing the sealed compound.

By early afternoon, stones were being thrown at police lines near Damascus Gate. Stun grenades were deployed, then tear gas. The crowds did not disperse — they fell back into the narrow lanes of the Old City and regrouped, where the alleys funnel movement and hold the smell of gas for hours in the enclosed air.

By evening, field medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society reported treating at least forty people for rubber bullet wounds, twenty-one for tear gas exposure, and several for injuries sustained in crowd crushing in narrow passages.

And two people were dead.

Reactions

The speed and breadth of international reaction was, by any measure, without precedent in the modern history of the conflict.

The Vatican issued a statement within two hours of the closure announcement — before the deaths were confirmed — calling the shutdown of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre “an act without parallel in the modern era” and demanding immediate restoration of access. A second Vatican statement, issued after the deaths of Mariam Qassis and Georges Haddad were confirmed, described the killing of “unarmed Christian civilians outside the doors of the most sacred site in Christendom” as “a profound moral catastrophe” and called on all Catholic governments to summon their Israeli ambassadors.

Jordan, which holds Hashemite custodianship of Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem under the 1994 Wadi Araba Treaty, recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv within six hours and called the closure “a unilateral annulment of solemn treaty obligations.” Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said Jordan considered the closure “an act of aggression against both the Islamic and Christian worlds simultaneously.”

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation convened an emergency session. Saudi Arabia suspended its ongoing normalisation talks with Israel. Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Morocco issued a joint condemnation. Egypt summoned the Israeli ambassador in Cairo.

Spain announced it was recalling its ambassador for consultations and stated that the day’s events were “incompatible with Israel’s obligations under international law and its status as a partner of the European Union.” It was the sharpest unilateral European response and the first time a major EU member state had recalled its Israeli ambassador since the founding of the state.

The European Union called an emergency session of the Foreign Affairs Council.

China and the Soviet Union issued a joint statement calling for an emergency UN Security Council session. The Soviet statement included a line that drew particular attention in diplomatic circles: “The closure of sites sacred to billions, enforced through lethal violence against unarmed civilians, cannot be treated by the international community as an internal matter of any state.”

The United States State Department issued a statement expressing “deep concern” and calling for “de-escalation and dialogue.” It did not mention the names of the dead. Several members of Congress issued statements that went considerably further. Representative Aaliyah Osei-Mensah of Michigan called the closures “an act of deliberate religious desecration” and called for an immediate suspension of military aid. She was joined by thirty-one co-signatories — the largest bloc of congressional voices to call for aid suspension in a single statement in American legislative history to that point.

The Israeli government did not respond to international condemnations individually. The Prime Minister’s Office issued a single statement late Friday evening: “Israel will not accept foreign interference in the administration of its sovereign territory. The renovation programme will proceed as planned. Access will be restored when the structural work is complete and the sites are certified safe.”

In Beit Jala

Yousef Haddad, 44, received confirmation of his father’s death by telephone from Hadassah Hospital at 6 p.m. He had spent the afternoon trying to reach him.

He sat in his family home in Beit Jala — a town of stone houses and olive trees and churches that has been Christian longer than the Ottoman Empire existed — and spoke to Al Jazeera for twenty minutes. He is a carpenter. He has two daughters, aged nine and twelve. His father, Georges, had lived in the same house for fifty years.

He said his father had been to the Holy Sepulchre hundreds of times across his life. He said his father used to say that the church was not a building — it was a place where something happened, and you went there to be near where it happened, and no government in history had ever been able to change what happened there.

“He held his rosary,” Yousef said. “They told me that. He was holding it when they found him near the gate.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“He went to pray,” he said. “There is nothing else I want to say about it. He was 71 years old and he went to pray and they shot him. That is the whole story.”

Zena Awad reported from Jerusalem. Hind Khoudary reported from Ramallah. Linah Alsaafin contributed from London. Additional reporting by Mersiha Gadzo. Editing by Jon Donnison.

Datastack Archives

Explorer