Ramallah, West Bank - The United States and Israel are reportedly working to end Jordan's decades-old custodianship of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, a move that could ignite conflict and trigger repercussions around the world.
According to US, Jordanian, and Palestinian officials, the alleged plan - backed by President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner - would dissolve the Jordanian-backed Islamic Waqf and rebrand one of Islam's holiest sites as a multi-faith tourist destination.
It is the most ambitious attempt yet to overturn a religious and political order that has held at the sensitive religious compound for decades, surviving repeated wars and uprisings.
Hashemite guardianship has functioned as both a symbol of Arab and Muslim stewardship over the site and a practical check on the clashes that have routinely dragged Jerusalem, and often the wider region, into violence. Observers say that replacing it with an Israeli-created body and a tourist-friendly framing would erase that restraint.
At the centre of the dispute is the "status quo", the arrangement that took shape after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967. Under it, the compound Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif stayed under the administration of the Jordanian-run Waqf, and non-Muslims could visit during set hours but not pray.
That equation, a range of Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli affairs analysts say, has been taken apart one step at a time, long before any custodianship plan was in place.
"Israel is redefining the status quo in practice, without any direct political declaration," Ziad Abhais, a researcher specialising in Jerusalem affairs, told The New Arab .
The most dangerous shift, he argued, is an increasing Jewish-Israeli presence inside the compound "from the framework of visitation to the framework of organised worship", a change which he said carries political and religious dimensions beyond any security pretext and "opens the door to future demands for shared sovereignty".
Israel has moved, in his account, from managing settler incursions to controlling the texture of the site, the gates, the opening and closing hours, the movement of worshippers, and even the Waqf staff.
Jamal Amro, a Jerusalemite researcher, sees the same trajectory from the angle of administration. He calls the process "a gradual replacement of sovereignty", with the Israeli police now "the real decision-maker" inside the mosque, setting entry times, imposing age limits, and banning overnight worship. Amro also points to what he terms the "spatial engineering" of the site: the excavations beneath Jerusalem and the tunnels and tourist routes linking settlement outposts to the Western Wall. "These projects do not target the tourist dimension alone," he said. "They work to entrench actual Israeli sovereignty over the place and shrink the historic Islamic role." The Hebron model The precedent that analysts fear lies 30 kilometres south, at Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque . After Baruch Goldstein's 1994 massacre of Palestinian worshippers there, Israel closed the mosque for roughly six months and convened the Shamgar Commission, which recommended separating Muslim and Jewish worshippers.
The site was partitioned, with Palestinian authorities saying close to 60 per cent was eventually allocated to Jewish prayer, governed by electronic gates, recurring bans on the call to prayer and tight limits on the Waqf. The measures were introduced as security arrangements and never reversed .
The arrangement hardened again in July 2025, when Israel transferred administrative control from the Palestinian Waqf and the Hebron municipality to the religious council of Kiryat Arba, the settlement where Goldstein had lived, later seizing part of the inner courtyard roof and stripping the municipality of planning powers in favour of the Israeli Civil Administration. Palestinian officials called it the most significant change at the site since 1994.
For political analyst Ahmad Rafiq Awad, that sequence is the template now being laid over Al-Aqsa . "Israel works to entrench a new reality that makes the Jewish presence inside Al-Aqsa a natural and accepted matter over time," he told TNA , reading the allocation of fixed hours to settlers as a temporal division meant to prepare the ground for a spatial one.
He warned that construction work around and beneath the compound has not been "fully disclosed", even as it expands, posing a danger to both the structure itself and the political status quo.
“The police now treat the Jewish presence as a fixed right that requires organisation and protection, while Palestinian worshippers are restricted and Waqf guards pushed aside,” Hassan Khater, an expert in international law, told TNA .
UN and UNESCO resolutions affirm the mosque's Islamic character, he noted, "but the absence of enforcement tools makes these resolutions closer to diplomatic positions than to measures capable of stopping the changes on the ground". A reality hard to reverse When Ramadan began this year on 18 February, Israel granted Jewish visitors extended hours on the compound while turning away large numbers of Muslims, with some left to pray in the streets outside. The Palestinian Jerusalem Governorate said Israel had barred the Waqf from routine preparations for the month, including shade structures and temporary medical clinics. The closures drew joint condemnation on 12 March from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Arab League, and the African Union (AU), which called them a grave violation of the historical and legal status quo. The trend is documented inside Israel, too, where the monitoring group Ir Amim in 2025 recorded an unprecedented rise in Jewish visits to the compound under police protection.
Awad stressed that the strategy extends well beyond Al-Aqsa into the whole of the Old City, where excavation work and tunnel and settlement construction are reshaping its historical composition "at the expense of the city's Arab and Islamic identity". “The current government,” he told The New Arab , “has granted extremist religious groups unprecedented influence, seating them inside the centres of political decision-making," a shift tied directly to the rising numbers of Jewish visits and the boldness of their behaviour, including performing religious rituals. Israel's Chief Rabbinate forbids Jewish entry to the site on the grounds of Halakha (Jewish law).
The acceleration tracks a change in Israeli politics, said Mohanad Mustafa, who studies Israeli affairs. Figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich "no longer hide their wish to impose Jewish sovereignty" over the compound, he noted, and rhetoric once confined to the fringe has entered official debate.
That shift has given cover to campaigners like Yehuda Glick, among the loudest voices for Jewish prayer at the site, who casts it as a matter of conscience. "Freedom of worship must include Jews too," he has said, a claim Palestinians and the Arab world reject outright. Redefining the status quo Rasem Obeidat, a writer and political analyst, places the mosque inside the wider contest for Jerusalem. What is underway, he said, is "an integrated project to impose new facts on the ground and change the identity of the city and its Islamic holy sites gradually", reaching beyond the compound through property seizures and Judaising tourist centres . "What is happening targets not only stone," he said, "but people, identity, and the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem." He described the trajectory as "a shift from managing the conflict to trying to settle it on the ground".
For Jordan, that trajectory now converges on the custodianship itself. Ibrahim al-Jazi, a former Jordanian minister of legal affairs, said the Hashemite role rests on historical agreements and clear international recognition, and that any move to bypass the Waqf "represents a violation of international law and of the agreement signed between Jordan and Israel in 1994". The Jordanian expert also added that restrictions on restoration work and the obstruction of repair materials are meant to move the real centre of decision-making inside the compound to the Israeli police.
Political analyst Hani al-Masri described an Israeli "policy of testing reactions", where officials introduce a new measure to gauge the level of Palestinian, Arab, and international objection, before making it permanent when no real pushback follows. Previous Israeli governments handled the file cautiously for fear of a regional backlash, he said, while the current administration looks "more willing to gamble", with any miscalculation potentially triggering "a wide explosion" across Jerusalem and the West Bank. “Each step is small enough to absorb on its own,” the analyst says. “Together, they have built a new reality at one of the most combustible sites on earth.” Aseel Mafarjeh is a Palestinian journalist based in the West Bank This story was produced in collaboration with Egab Edited by Charlie Hoyle