Israeli Press
Israeli police now let Jewish prayer books into the Al-Aqsa compound
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The arrangement that has governed the Al-Aqsa compound since 1967 lost another piece on Sunday, and it was an Israeli police decision that removed it.
Josh Breiner reported in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the police have eased their restrictions on Jewish prayer at the compound again, and now permit worshippers to carry siddurim — Jewish prayer books — onto the esplanade. The paper called it a new change to the status quo at the site.
The step follows a smaller one taken in January, when the police first allowed a single printed prayer page inside. That page had to be prepared in advance and handed out at the gate by the Temple Mount Yeshiva, and personal prayer books, phylacteries and other religious articles stayed on the banned list. The Jerusalem district commander, Major General Avshalom Peled, had been in the post two weeks.
How the line moved#
By February the police were permitting instruction sheets printed by the same yeshiva, with their use confined to areas the police mark out. The Jerusalem Post quoted the activist Yisrael Medad describing what that produced on the ground: "Now people can prostrate themselves and the police let them pray, sometimes for up to five minutes."
The police told the paper they "continue to act with discretion and responsibility in order to maintain a balance between the various needs." The activist group Beyadenu counted more than 68,000 Jewish visitors to the compound in the Hebrew year that ended in September 2025, a rise of 22 per cent.
The status quo the police are amending was set by Moshe Dayan after Israel took the Old City in 1967: the Islamic Waqf, under Jordanian custodianship, runs the compound's daily affairs, Israel holds security control, and non-Muslim prayer does not take place there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to say that Jewish prayer at the site is not permitted, while the police have gone on widening what is.
Jordan, which holds the custodianship, has been saying for months that the direction of travel is the danger. Its foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, described the erosion to the British newspaper The Guardian as "a constant threat, a dangerous threat that we're trying to counter in every tool that we have possible."
For Palestinians in Jerusalem, the compound is where policy is written in practice rather than announced. Each item added to the permitted list — a page, a sheet, now a bound book — is defended in Israel as a small administrative adjustment, and each one leaves the ground rules further from where they stood the week before.
