Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Tuesday he had stripped Palestinians of authority over the site of the Cave of Patriarchs, known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque, in the occupied West Bank.
The move to transfer management of the site to an Israeli committee controlled by the far-right minister, drew swift condemnation from the Palestinian Authority.
In a statement posted on his Telegram channel, Smotrich said the site will no longer be administered by the municipality authority in the West Bank city of Hebron.
“The meaning of this decision is that many authorities previously granted in Hebron and at the holy sites — including the very foundation of our existence, the Cave of the Patriarchs — are no longer under the control of the Hebron Municipality,” Smotrich said.
Smotrich posted his remarks as he attended an event marking the laying of the foundation stone of a new Israeli settlement near Hebron.
“This is much more than a planning step, it is a step… of practical sovereignty, of governance,” Smotrich said, according to footage of the ceremony released by his party.
Hebron is the largest city in the West Bank, the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
The Cave of the Patriarchs sits inside H2, an Israeli-controlled sector of the city housing roughly 40,000 Palestinians alongside some 200 Israeli settler families.
It is venerated by Jews, Muslims and Christians alike as the burial site of Abraham and other biblical patriarchs.
A 1997 protocol left management of most of the complex in Palestinian hands, an arrangement Palestinian officials say Israel has steadily eroded in recent years.
“What Smotrich did is he controls the Higher Planning Council, which set a meeting last Wednesday where they decided that these responsibilities in Hebron will go from the Palestinian municipality of Hebron to Israel,” Yonatan Mizrahi, co-director of Peace Now, an Israeli settlement watchdog, told AFP.
Minutes from the planning meeting confirm this decision.
The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, led by president Mahmoud Abbas, rejected the move outright.
“Such unilateral measures are rejected and condemned, and constitute a violation of signed agreements with the Israeli side, as well as a breach of international law,” Abbas’s office said.
In a statement, Hebron’s municipality condemned Smotrich’s announcement, which came on the day marking the Islamic new year.
Mayor Youssef al-Jaabari called the Israeli move “a new attempt to impose control over the historic heart of the city of Hebron,” and pointed to Palestinian presence in the Ibrahimi Mosque despite movement restrictions inside the city.
Smotrich, himself a settler, has faced mounting criticism from the international community for being a vocal advocate of West Bank annexation.
Expanding settlements has been a policy under successive Israeli governments but has accelerated under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, which is backed by far-right allies such as Smotrich.
More than 500,000 Israelis now live in the West Bank. excluding east Jerusalem, in settlements that are illegal under international law, among some three million Palestinians.
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