Israel bans grand mufti of Jerusalem from Al-Aqsa Mosque over Gaza sermon
Sheikh Hussein’s lawyer said Israel extended initial 8-day ban to 6 months
Updated 06 August 2025
Arab News
LONDON: Israeli authorities on Wednesday extended their Al-Aqsa Mosque entry ban on Sheikh Mohammed Hussein, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories, over a Gaza sermon.
Sheikh Hussein’s lawyer said that Israel extended an initial eight-day ban on entering the holy site in East Jerusalem to an additional six months.
Authorities imposed the first ban after a Friday sermon in late July, during which Sheikh Hussein denounced the Israeli starvation policy against 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, Wafa news agency reported. Israeli forces summoned the grand mufti on July 27 and issued him an eight-day expulsion order from the mosque, which could be renewed.
The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs condemned the Israeli decision.
“The ban of the mufti is a clear attempt by the (Israeli) occupation to empty Al-Aqsa of religious authorities who confront its plans, and demonstrate the extent and scope of its violations in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in general, and Al-Aqsa Mosque in particular,” it said in a statement.
Libya’s Red Castle museum opens for first time since fall of Qaddafi
Updated 3 sec ago
Libya’s national museum, formerly known as As-Saraya Al-Hamra or the Red Castle, has reopened in Tripoli, allowing the public access to some of the country’s finest historical treasures for the first time since the revolt that toppled Muammar Qaddafi. The museum, Libya’s largest, was closed in 2011 during a NATO-backed uprising against longtime ruler Qaddafi, who appeared on the castle’s ramparts to deliver a fiery speech. Renovations were started in March 2023 by the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU), which came to power in 2021 in a UN-backed political process. “The reopening of the National Museum is not just a cultural moment but a live testimony that Libya is building its institutions,” GNU Prime Minister Abdulhamid Al-Dbiebah said at a reopening ceremony on Friday. Built in the 1980s, the museum’s 10,000 square meters of gallery space features mosaics and murals, sculptures, coins, and artefacts dating back to prehistoric times and stretching through Libya’s Roman, Greek and Islamic periods. The collection also includes millennia-old mummies from the ancient settlements of Uan Muhuggiag in Libya’s deep south, and Jaghbub near its eastern border with Egypt. “The current program focuses on enabling schools to visit the museum during this period, until it is officially opened to the public at the beginning of the year,” museum director Fatima Abdullah Ahmed told Reuters. Libya has since recovered 21 artefacts that were smuggled out of the country after Qaddafi’s fall, notably from France, Switzerland, and the United States, the chairman of the board of directors of the antiquities department Mohamed Farj Shakshoki told Reuters ahead of the opening. Shakshoki said that talks are ongoing to recover more than two dozen artefacts from Spain and others from Austria. In 2022, Libya received nine artefacts, including funerary stone heads, urns and pottery from the US Libya houses five UNESCO World Heritage sites, which it said in 2016 were all endangered due to instability and conflict. In July, Libya’s delegation to UNESCO said the ancient city of Ghadames, one of the sites, had been removed from the list as the security situation had improved.
