Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir led approximately 900 Israelis into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Monday, the third day of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, under heavy police protection. The group danced in circles and sang inside the courtyards while Ben-Gvir declared: "We are the owners of the place in Al-Aqsa and in the prisons, and we have turned the lives of terrorist prisoners into hell." He added that "the people of Israel are on the path to absolute victory." The incursion was not spontaneous. Israeli forces closed intersections and streets surrounding Jerusalem's Old City to facilitate the entry. Dozens of Palestinian shopkeepers in the Cotton Merchants Market were forced to shutter their businesses, and residents were ordered to stay indoors to clear the way for Jewish prayers during Sukkot. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel confirmed the forced closures. This is sovereignty theater operating through religious symbolism. Ben-Gvir's language — "we are the owners" — is not incidental rhetoric. It is a deliberate claim of exclusive dominion over a site that is among the most contested in global geopolitics and one of Islam's three holiest places. The mechanism is familiar: repeated incursions normalize unilateral control, each iteration pushing the baseline further from the pre-2003 status quo when such entries were not permitted. Since 2003, Israeli police have allowed daily settler incursions into the compound except on Fridays and Saturdays. The trajectory has been consistently toward greater access for Israeli settlers and greater restriction for Palestinian worshippers. This year, Israel prevented Eid al-Fitr prayers at Al-Aqsa entirely, and allowed only 10,000 of the West Bank's 3.3 million Palestinians to attend the first Friday prayers of Ramadan — a 0.3% admission rate. Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh called the incursion "playing with fire and a dangerous provocation to the feelings of Muslims around the world," warning that Israel was seeking to ignite a "religious war." That language is diplomatic code for a real structural risk: each escalation at Al-Aqsa carries the potential to catalyze regional responses disproportionate to the local event, as happened in May 2021 when similar provocations helped trigger an 11-day conflict. The extraction here is not primarily economic — it is spatial and symbolic. Palestinian access to their own holy site, commercial life, and freedom of movement is being systematically reduced to create facts on the ground. The forced closures of shops and the confinement of residents to their homes are not security measures; they are demonstrations of who exercises sovereignty and who does not. Ben-Gvir's dual reference to Al-Aqsa and prisons in the same sentence is telling — both are arenas where he is asserting dominion over Palestinian bodies and spaces. The twenty-year trajectory is not subtle. If the post-2003 pattern of escalating incursions continues, Al-Aqsa's status quo collapses entirely — the compound becomes functionally partitioned or exclusively controlled, Palestinian commercial life in the Old City is permanently subordinated to settler religious calendar, and the site becomes a permanent flashpoint that any regional actor can activate at will.
