Jerusalem — Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, performing Jewish prayers in direct violation of long-established legal and religious protocols. His incursion, escorted by armed security and accompanied by over 1,250 settlers, was not a spiritual act, but a staged provocation under the banner of state-backed apartheid.
The visit, timed with the Jewish mourning day of Tisha B’Av, drew immediate condemnation from across the Arab and Islamic world. Jordan, the official custodian of the holy site, denounced it as a “dangerous violation” of the status quo. Turkey warned that Israel’s religious provocations risk inciting a “regional explosion.” And the Palestinian Authority accused the Israeli government of using religious symbolism to camouflage its project of demographic engineering in Jerusalem.
Ben-Gvir’s actions follow a well-documented pattern: the weaponization of faith to further what legal scholars now call a slow-moving genocide. The al-Aqsa incursion comes just days after Israeli forces gunned down at least 33 starving Palestinians near an aid truck in northern Gaza. In the past three months, over 1,800 Palestinians have been killed while trying to access food, many of them children. In any other country, this would be called what it is: engineered famine.
The fiction of victimhood, the reality of colonial conquest
Israel’s Zionist narrative, built on Holocaust trauma and biblical entitlement, continues to mask what human rights organizations from Amnesty to Human Rights Watch have already labeled a regime of apartheid. But Ben-Gvir’s display at al-Aqsa reveals what has long been denied: this is not a defensive war, nor a clash of civilizations. It is a methodical conquest, sustained by US weapons, Western hypocrisy, and a dangerous belief in racial supremacy.
Ben-Gvir’s politics are not fringe. He is a senior minister in a coalition government whose members routinely advocate for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the annexation of Gaza, and the dismantling of the two-state framework. His presence at Islam’s third holiest site wasn’t symbolic; it was strategic. It was a signal to settlers, to the military, and to the international community: Israel is not interested in peace. It is interested in erasure.
Famine as a weapon of war
While Ben-Gvir postured in Jerusalem, Gaza continued to suffocate. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled. UN schools have been bombed. Hospitals have run out of anesthetics. Children are dying not just from bombs but from hunger. At least six adults and 93 children have starved to death since May. According to the UN, over 340,000 children are now at acute risk of dying from malnutrition-related causes.
Despite Israel’s claim that aid is being allowed in, field workers describe a different reality: bureaucratic bottlenecks, targeted strikes on food convoys, and humiliating restrictions that have turned Gaza into what one UN official called “a starvation laboratory.”
Aid groups have described the killings near food lines as not accidental but deliberate. “This isn’t collateral damage,” said one field medic. “It’s collective punishment.” Gaza’s population is being choked under a siege so total that even access to water and bread is a matter of life and death.
Al-Aqsa as colonial theater
Ben-Gvir’s staged religious performance at al-Aqsa is part of Israel’s broader strategy of Judaizing occupied East Jerusalem. From home demolitions in Sheikh Jarrah to the expansion of illegal settlements around Silwan, every move is designed to replace one population with another. The violence is not new. But the silence is.
The Biden administration’s response was textbook. Vague “concern,” no condemnation, and continued military funding. European leaders issued mild statements urging “restraint.” But there is no restraint in a one-sided war. There is only complicity.
Zionism’s truth: A settler colony built on starvation and steel
Saturday’s incursion should not be viewed in isolation. It is the ideological culmination of a state that has built its very identity on conquest. From the ashes of European antisemitism, Israel has erected a militarized ethno-state that punishes the indigenous people of Palestine for crimes they did not commit.
And it has done so with the full backing of Western powers, media whitewashing, and decades of diplomatic immunity. What Ben-Gvir demonstrated was not religious defiance but settler domination. A state minister entered a Muslim holy site, under gunpoint, during a war that started, while his military starved civilians to death less than 100 kilometers away.
This is the fiction of Zionist victimhood—shattered by the reality of genocide.
According to the Associated Press, Ben-Gvir’s visit marked yet another act of aggression wrapped in religious symbolism. His open prayer, performed with settler groups and under the protection of armed police, blatantly violated existing agreements and set off new regional tensions, further underscoring Israel’s total disregard for international norms and the sanctity of non-Jewish faiths in the occupied territories.
