Israeli soldiers invaded, on Monday at dawn, a mosque in Halhoul town, north of the southern West Bank city of Hebron, to accompany colonialist settlers into the holy site, and injured six Palestinians, in addition to causing dozens to suffer the effects of tear gas inhalation.Media sources said several Israeli army jeeps invaded the town, at dawn, to accompany dozens of paramilitary colonialist settlers into Nabi Mousa Mosque to perform prayers, after forcing the Palestinians out.They added that the Palestinians protested the invasion and hurled stones at the army, while the soldiers fired many rubber-coated steel bullets, gas bombs, and concussion grenades.
I was curious why Jews would want to visit Halhoul.
It turns out there are a lot of reasons.
Halhoul is mentioned in the Tanach - Joshua 15:58. It kept the same name all this time.
It has long been considered the burial place of Gad the Seer (2 Samuel 24:11) and Jews have made pilgrimages there for centuries. Rabbi Yitzchak Chelo*, of Aragon, visited Palestine in 1333, and wrote about Halhoul in his book The Ways of Jerusalem (quoted here from the French by Victor Guerin):
From there [from Tekoa '] we go to Halhul, place mentioned in Joshua. There are a number of Jews here, who lead you to an ancient sepulchral monument, attributed to Gad the Seer. This is the third tomb of the seven prophets.
It remained a place of pilgrimage for Jews in 1847, when John Wilson visited.
So we see that Jews lives in Halhoul in the Middle Ages, they venerated it for much longer as the burial place of a prophet, and it is clearly an important Biblical site.
Now we understand why Palestinians try to keep in Jew-free. That's what they try to do to every important historic Jewish place.
*UPDATE: Apparently, the Yitzchak Chelo pilgrimage story was a forgery. See here. But Halhoul was still a place of pilgrimage.
A hat tip goes to someone on Wikipedia who found this obscure mistake in one of my tens of thousands of articles in order to call me "garbage" in the Talk section. He or she could have just emailed or tweeted me with the terrible crime of not researching a 19th century French scholar's sources to see if they have not been debunked. I would have gladly fixed it. Apparently, calling me names is more important than correcting the record.
