In the space of a week, Al Aqsa Mosque went from welcoming tens of thousands of Ramadan worshippers for Friday prayers to having none at all, after Israeli authorities shut down Jerusalem’s Old City due to the war.
The threat from missile fire is real, but the disappointment among locals at their city being empty was still palpable. Spring is a key season for tourism, but Ramadan visitors have now disappeared. Easter, which follows shortly after, is supposed to bring another swell, but that now also seems in doubt.
Police, either at checkpoints or in roving patrols, were stationed every dozen metres or so on Al Wad Street, one of the main thoroughfares to Al Aqsa. Many were demanding ID when The National visited. Paths leading to the gates of the mosque were completely closed, as was access to the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There were some Jewish worshippers, press photographers and barely a Palestinian in sight.
At the Khan Al Zeit marketplace, set back from entrances to Al Aqsa, some residents milled about but only about one in 20 shops were open, most of them grocery stalls, bakeries and pharmacies. A few others that tried to open received a swift visit from the police ordering them to close.
“The situation is sensitive,” one Arabic-speaking police officer said to the owner of a bathroom appliance shop, as he told him to shut down. Even for residents, who have so often been plunged into complete lockdown since the Gaza war, and the Covid-19 pandemic before that, this was draconian.
“I’ll be praying from the shop,” one fruit and vegetable vendor told The National, who did not want to be named fearing trouble from the authorities. “In the early days of the last war it was sometimes possible to pray by the gates of the mosque, but today you can’t even get there.”
Israel’s police said on Thursday that the closure is in line with nationwide military restrictions on public life during the war with Iran and Hezbollah. Although the rate of Iranian missile fire at Israel appears to have slowed, the risk remains, and Jerusalem has seen strikes, falling shrapnel and direct Iranian threats since the war began.
In the absence of much to do before prayers began, conversations quickly turned to another obsession of the city: geopolitics. Most thought the high-intensity fighting could not go on for more than a few weeks, but there were fears that it might take tourism, a particularly sensitive industry that the Old City relies on, far longer to bounce back.
Father Athanasius, a Catholic monk who has worked in the city for decades, was shocked at the absence of people on the Via Dolorosa, the route that Jesus walked before his crucifixion, which today intersects with many of the streets that would otherwise be crammed with Muslims reaching Al Aqsa.
“It looks like this,” he said, pointing at a nondescript backstreet in the Christian Quarter that is quiet even in busy times. “But to see the mosque this empty, when the weather is like this, that really is something else.”
The churchman, who has seen the Old City during so many upheavals in the Israel-Palestine conflict, was very wary about the future.
He was also having to worry about the day-to-day running of his monastery. His workers were unable to get into the Old City, so he was doing the bread run.
“In Catholic moral theology, there’s a deep awareness of the danger of letting the will go wherever it wants. The will, if strong enough, can overpower any intellectual consideration. I think that’s what’s happening here,” he said, shuffling around the many plastic bags he was now carrying.
“The US and Israel want to change Iran so much that they’ve gone into this whole thing without thinking it through. We have no idea where this will end.”
