PRESS RELEASE
6 August 2026
Amman meeting on Al-Aqsa agrees to document violations, not to end them
Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA) records its profound disappointment at the outcome of the Ministerial Meeting, convened in Amman on 5 August by Jordan and the Arab League's Ministerial Committee on Jerusalem, and attended by foreign ministers from across the Arab and Muslim world, to address the escalating threat facing Masjid Al-Aqsa and occupied Jerusalem.
The meeting came only weeks after more than 4,200 Israeli settlers, led by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, stormed the Masjid Al-Aqsa compound on Tisha B'Av, one of the largest incursions in recent history. Yet the principal, concrete outcome of this gathering has been an agreement to launch a further mechanism to document Israeli violations.
This represents an abrogation of responsibility towards Al-Aqsa.
Ismail Patel, Chair of Friends of Al-Aqsa, said:
“Masjid Al-Aqsa is not under threat because the world lacks information. It is under threat because the world lacks the political will to act on the information it already has. For years, NGOs, human rights organisations and United Nations bodies have documented Israel's violations of international law, its repeated assaults on the historic and legal status quo at Al-Aqsa, its restrictions on Palestinian worshippers, its settlement expansion and its attempts to alter the identity and character of occupied Jerusalem. Al-Aqsa now faces the imminent threat of falling under full Israeli control. Emergency meetings should deliver emergency action. Instead, states have chosen to establish another process to record violations that have already been exhaustively documented.”
It is a tragedy that Muslim-majority governments continue to observe while Israel changes the facts on the ground. Documentation without accountability risks becoming little more than an archive of international inaction while the situation at Al-Aqsa remains critical. Al-Aqsa does not need another database of abuses; it needs states willing to translate their declarations into diplomatic, legal and economic consequences for the government that commits them.
FOA calls on the governments represented in Amman to move beyond documentation and towards genuine deterrence: to press for accountability through the United Nations Security Council and International Criminal Court, to review bilateral and trade relations that shield Israel from consequence, and to give the Jerusalem Awqaf the practical, financial and diplomatic backing it needs to defend its custodianship of the holy sites in fact, not only in name.
If governments remain unwilling to match the scale of the crisis with the scale of their response, then responsibility falls ever more heavily upon civil society. It is our duty to ensure that the protection of Al-Aqsa remains at the forefront of public and political consciousness, in Britain and internationally. History will not judge nations by how well they documented the threat to Al-Aqsa, but by whether they acted before it was too late.
