New US ambassador to Israel breaks into al-Aqsa mosque right after assuming post
Mike Huckabee, the newly appointed US Ambassador to the Israeli-occupied territories, in a provocative move, broke into Al-Aqsa Mosque along with Israeli settlers and performed rituals at the Al-Buraq Wall, one day after assuming his post.
Huckabee, a radical Christian Zionist who once said “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” placed a handwritten note into the cracks of the wall, a long-standing Zionist tradition at the occupied site.
He said the message came directly from US President Donald Trump.
“President Trump wrote this himself last Thursday and sent me here to place it,” Huckabee told reporters. “I’m doing this with the president’s best wishes.”
His visit took place during the Jewish holiday of Passover, which has seen repeated Israeli settler incursions into al-Aqsa Mosque compound under protection of Israeli forces who prevent Muslim worshippers from entry.
Huckabee is a devout Christian Zionist, firmly embracing the Zionist narrative that the occupied Palestinian territories belong to the Jewish people.
In 2008, on the presidential campaign trail in Massachusetts, he had extremely inflammatory remarks that triggered severe backlash. “There is really no such thing as a Palestinian,” he said, dehumanizing Palestinians and calling their identity “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.”
In the meantime, Israeli airstrikes across Gaza killed at least 17 people on Friday, including a pregnant woman and children, hospital workers said.
Among the dead were 10 people in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp, including eight from the same house, according to the Indonesian Hospital, which received the bodies.
In the southern city of Khan Younis, seven people were killed, one of them a pregnant woman, according to Nasser Hospital, where the bodies were brought.
Since October 7, 2023, after the Israel regime launched its genocidal war on Gaza, 51,065 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed, and more than 116,505 others injured, while more than 14,000 remain missing.
