On the morning of August 21, 1969, a huge fire broke out in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the fire quickly spread to the southern portico, the mihrab of Salah al-Din, and the dome pillars in the blessed mosque, in a Jewish attempt to turn the sacred Islamic heritage, even the most sacred, and rare in human civilization, into a pile of ashes. To build the alleged temple on its ruins.
Jerusalemites, Muslims and Christians, rushed to extinguish the fire, just as Palestinians from villages and cities in the West Bank rushed to participate in extinguishing it and saving Al-Aqsa Mosque from the imminent Jewish threat to destroy it.
The Israeli occupation army closed the gates of the Haram and Al-Aqsa Mosque, to prevent the Palestinians from entering to extinguish the fire, so that the Zionist flames, which hate to Arabism, Islam and all humanity, would devour it.
The Palestinians forced the Israeli army to open the doors after a violent clash that lasted 45 minutes, thinking that "Israel" would turn the Al-Aqsa Mosque into ashes during that period.
When the Palestinians started trying to pump water from the wells of the mosque, they found the water pumps unfit for work, so they took the water with small containers and climbed the roof of the mosque to extinguish the fire.
And when the fire trucks arrived from the municipalities of Ramallah, Al-Bireh, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Bethlehem and Hebron to participate in extinguishing the fire, the occupation army and the Israeli police prevented them from entering the mosque yard under the pretext that the extinguishing operation is within the jurisdiction of the Zionist occupied Jerusalem municipality. The Palestinians succeeded in putting out the fire after the important part of the mosque was burned, including the mihrab of Salah al-Din, which he took from the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo to Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem.
And the Israeli government officially announced, as usual in lying and deceit, that the fire was due to a defect in the electrical wires inside Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Arab Jerusalem Electricity Company, at the request of the Islamic Commission, sent a committee of experts and engineers to investigate the causes of the fire, and they confirmed that it was not the result of an electrical fault, as officially announced by “Israel”, but rather an intentional fire.
They proved that the fire was meticulously planned, which embarrassed the Israeli government and prompted it to announce the arrest of the person who confessed to having set the arson attack, the Jew Michael Mohan, and brought him to trial and sentenced him to five years in prison, and later issued a decision to release him and deport him to Australia.