Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre

On 25 February 1994, during dawn prayers in the holy month of Ramadan — a date that also fell on the Jewish holiday of Purim — Baruch Goldstein, an American-born physician, army reserve officer, and settler from Kiryat Arba who belonged to Meir Kahane’s Kach movement, entered the Ibrahimi Mosque, the Cave of the Patriarchs, in Hebron wearing his army uniform. He opened fire on kneeling worshippers with a Galil rifle, murdering 29 Palestinians and wounding more than a hundred before survivors beat him to death.

Protests erupted across the occupied territory, and Israeli forces killed more Palestinians in the days that followed. On 18 March 1994 the UN Security Council, in resolution 904, strongly condemned the massacre “and its aftermath which took the lives of more than fifty Palestinian civilians and injured several hundred others,” called on Israel to prevent acts of violence by settlers including by confiscating arms, and called for a temporary international presence to protect Palestinian civilians. The Rabin government appointed a commission of inquiry headed by Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar, which concluded that Goldstein had acted alone, and outlawed the Kach movement; Israel and the United States designated Kach a terrorist organization. In Hebron itself, however, the army imposed a prolonged curfew — on the city’s Palestinians.

The lasting measures fell on the Palestinian population. Shuhada Street, once the Old City’s commercial heart, was closed to Palestinian traffic and later to Palestinian pedestrians, and the army welded shut or ordered closed hundreds of shops; by 2017, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs counted more than 500 commercial establishments shut by military order and at least 1,100 more closed by their owners amid the restrictions, with roughly a third of homes in the restricted area abandoned. The 1997 Hebron Protocol divided the city into H1, administered by the Palestinian Authority, and H2 — 20 per cent of the city, home to a few hundred settlers and more than 40,000 Palestinians — kept under full Israeli control. The Temporary International Presence in Hebron, a civilian observer mission of 65 monitors created in 1994 under resolution 904, watched over the city until Israel refused to renew its mandate in January 2019. Goldstein’s grave in Kiryat Arba became a pilgrimage site for his admirers.