By Awad al-Rajoub, IOL Palestine Correspondent

AL-KHALIL, February 25 (IslamOnline.net) – The West Bank city of AL-Khalil commemorated Tuesday, February 25, the ninth anniversary of the horrible Al-Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, when a Jewish terrorist rained worshippers with bullets killing at least 50 Palestinians and wounding about 200 others.

The Ibrahimi Mosque is still closed at an Israeli military order. It has been three months and ten days since the mosque’s closure.

Israeli occupation troops denied Palestinian worshippers access to the mosque except for performing few prayers when they lift off the curfew every now and then and only for two hours or so.

Palestinian Chief Justice and Preacher of the Ibrahimi Mosque Bayoud al-Tamimi condemned the mosque closure as a brazen violation of all international norms and regulations.

“Israeli occupation troops have closed the mosque since November 14, 2002 and prevent its custodians from reaching it and Azaan (the call for prayer) to be raised,” Tamimi told IslamOnline on Tuesday.

“The curfew imposed on the old city of Al-Khalil prevents 50,000 Palestinians from leaving their homes to meet their basic daily needs except for a couple of hours,” he lamented.

Tamimi dismissed the status quo in the Palestinian territories as a “human catastrophe,” noting that the Israeli occupation was trying to “judaize” the city and enhance the construction of settlements with the aim of “obliterating” the Islamic city.

For his part, Imam of the Ibrahimi Mosque Sheikh Maher Maswadi said he has been denied access to the mosque since the eighth of past Ramadan, pointing out that the denizens of Al-Khalil got used to performing their prayers in the mosque, particularly in the holy month of Ramadan, but were deprived of this right.

“We are not allowed to enter the mosque, while the (Jewish) settlers are moving freely into the mosque,” he said.

Maswadi said the Israeli campaign against the mosque has been intensified in the wake of the notorious massacre, adding that Israel set up specific dates and Jewish feasts, during which Muslims were prohibited from entering the mosque.

He said the Israeli occupation troops upgraded recently the monitoring system inside the mosque by installing cameras and new electronic gates.

Maswadi added that the Israeli campaign was not only limited to the Ibrahimi Mosque, but included more than 20 other mosques, asserting that many mosques were set ablaze and sabotaged.

Victims Recall Bloody Day

Some eyewitnesses of the 1994 bloody massacre still have horrible recollections of the massacre.

Abdul Mina'em Zahra, a brother to two of the massacre’s martyrs, recalled that on February 25, 1994, the dawn of Friday Ramadan15, a Jewish terrorist, Baruch Goldstein, from Keryat settlement, massacred at least 50 worshipers in the Ibrahimi Mosque and wounded about 200 others.

“I was praying in the last rank at the mosque at that time and I heard a man saying in Hebrew “This is their last day in life,” and when we were about to prostrate I heard gunfire coming from every direction…and I heard explosions as if the mosque were collapsing,” said Shrief Barakat, 36, one of the survivors.

“I saw the blood gushing forth from the head of one of the prayers and people started shouting Allahu Akbar (Allah is Great).

“Then I rushed to help a 12-year-old boy and carried him but found the door shut and the Israeli soldiers didn’t allow me to exit.

“Afterwards, I found out that I got injured in my chest and went out to the ambulance, which took me to the hospital,” he recalled.

For their part, the Islamic and national powers warned of a recurrence of the deadly massacre, asserting that the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre was neither the first nor the last massacre in the occupied Palestinian territories.

“The successive Israeli governments are incessantly committing massacres against the Palestinian people, to mention but a few, the Qana and Jenin massacres,” they said.

Palestinian powers further called on the international community to protect the armless Palestinian people and their basic human right of freedom of worship.

The terrorist Goldstein, a well-known Kach leader and a physician, entered the Ibrahimi Mosque and emptied two clips of a machinegun into Moslem worshippers during the dawn prayer.

A shortage of blood and intensive care facilities, as well as the time delays of transporting injured contributed to a high death toll.

Many of the dead and injured were from the same families; they were shot as their heads were bent in prayer.

Israeli occupation soldiers used tear gas and guarded the entrance of the mosque after they heard gunfire, which contributed to the difficulty of evacuating the dead and injured.

Some eyewitnesses reported that soldiers took part in the shooting afterward.