On her 26th anniversary ... How did Goldstein implement the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre?

Awad al-Rajoub - Hebron

Since the massacre committed by Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein against worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque 26 years ago, the Palestinian residents who go to the mosque to pray are subject to the most severe siege measures in Palestine, as the occupation surrounds the area by 120 barriers.

Those arriving to pray at Ibrahim Al-Khalil Mosque from the Old City must pass a three-stage military barrier in less than ten meters: a vertical turnstile, an electronic gate, and an iron gate adjacent to a manned military post.

In the second stage, and about ten meters further, a group of adjacent electronic gates, and here worshipers must push a horizontal iron gate, then the metal detector electronic gate, followed by the stage of checking IDs by the soldiers behind the glass, then demobilizing through a horizontal metal gate to the entrance to the mosque.

Before these checkpoints, there were two points in the mosque’s road to the occupation army, with approximately 12 soldiers deployed, the first at the beginning of the ascending stairs of the mosque adjacent to its western wall, and the second at the direct door to the mosque at the top of the stairs.

Eyewitness
On the dawn of Friday, February 25, 1994, the massacre took place, killing 29 worshipers and dozens of wounded. The military deployment was not as usual, and the checkpoints had no more than four soldiers, according to the testimony of the guard, Muhammad Suleiman Abu Saleh.

Since his appointment as a guard, Abu Saleh was a witness to dozens of violent attacks by settlers, and was among the heads of settlers at the time Baruch Marzel, Moshe Levinger and the curses of Cohen, all of whom continue their attacks on the Palestinian population, and the most prominent is Baruch Goldstein.

Abu Saleh says to Al-Jazeera Net the February 25 massacre was not the first assault on Goldstein on worshipers, as he pre-empted his crime with other crimes at close intervals without the occupation army interfering, deterring, or arresting him. He was constantly attacking worshipers, and he used to attend staples and spray them on the path of the worshipers, and he would sign many of them, as he had previously threw petrol bombs on the mosque mat.

All this and other actions - and the hadith of Abu Saleh - opened the eyes of the guards of the Ibrahimi Mosque to the soldier settler and pediatrician Goldstein, who was born to an Orthodox family in Brooklyn, New York in 1956, on the day of the massacre he came in wearing a helmet and his uniform, carrying a gun, a pistol and a bag, and went on his way to the mosque and took one of the The guards are following him.

The massacre
Baruch spent some time in the back of the mosque that settlers usually storm, but he returned without a bag, and this sparked the attention of the guards who followed the bag, and it turned out that he had emptied his bullets in his pockets, which added to suspicions around him.

Abu Saleh then rushed to the entrance leading to the front of the mosque, where hundreds of worshipers perform the Fajr prayer and recline on it and close it to his body, so if Goldstein asks him to enter as an officer, he refused, so it was not the last of them that his most famous weapon and pushed Abu Saleh fell to the ground, and if the settler reclines On the wall, and begins shooting bullets from his weapon towards the worshipers.

At this moment, Abu Saleh was in shock and was repeating the two testimonials waiting for his soul to rise to the sky, thinking that the bullets would shoot him. But after a few minutes, he did not feel a bleeding, then he realized that he was not injured, and he looked at Baruch, and if he is in it, he goes deep into the mosque and shoots.

"I stood up to try to do something, but he pointed his rifle at me and shot him. I landed and escaped, and later I found that the bullets hit the wall completely vertical, and Baruch continued his crime with the second prostration, using two bombs, in addition to the lead combs he had," he said.

Abu Saleh asserts that Baruch was not alone, "but that settlers helped him in shooting, and the occupation army who stormed the mosque helped him in intense gunfire in those moments."

Scenes of the seven minutes of the crime and its aftermath are still in the minds of retired guard Abu Saleh. Among the most bloody scenes is what happened to the mosque's muezzin, Jamil Al Natsheh, who was tall and stood directly behind the imam, as the bullets split his skull into two halves, and the twelve-year-old boy was like bleeding his neck in the arms of his father.

On that day, Abu Saleh adds, the worshipers ’clothes were turned into bandages, and people scrambled to the wounded to assist them, without anyone being allowed to march towards Baruch, who was found murdered at the corner of the western mosque.

One of the paradoxes narrated by Abu Saleh is that he was arrested at a military checkpoint months after the massacre, and was forcibly taken to the court to testify before a committee investigating the massacre formed by the occupation, and he called it the "Shamgar" committee, so all the questions were about Goldstein's murderer who is still unknown and not about the victims.

The Ibrahimi Mosque was closed after the massacre nearly six months, and the committee concluded that about half of the mosque was cut off by settlers, and electronic gates were installed on the doors of the mosque to limit the access of worshipers.

The hero killer
After the crime, the settlers buried Goldstein with the settlement of Kiryat Arba, where he lived, and turned his grave into a shrine for extremists as if it were a national hero, while the political level continues to support settlers in every way, the last of which was the Minister of Defense Naftali Bennett allowing them to demolish a Palestinian market and establish an outpost above it.

In the vicinity of the Ibrahimi Mosque, the occupation imposes a strict siege to this day, restricts entry to non-residents of the region, and continues to close historical markets with more than 1,600 shops.

In addition to the new focus on the ruins of the vegetable market, the occupation has five settlement outposts in the Old City of Hebron, inhabited by about 500 settlers, while dozens of fixed and inhabited military checkpoints are spread, which has turned the town into ghettos, and the residents' lives into hell.