As tens of thousands of worshippers held evening prayers inside Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque on Friday night, the final Friday of Ramadan, Israeli police in riot gear stormed the building and attacked Palestinian worshippers as well as protesters who gathered in their defense.
Israeli forces injured at least 178 Palestinians in the attack, Al Jazeera reports, though medics with the Palestinian Red Crescent emergency service told the Associated Press that more than 200 people were injured and that 88 were hospitalized with rubber bullet wounds, serious eye and head injuries, and broken jaws.
The attack comes at a particularly tense moment in Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine. The past week has seen nightly vigils in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem where several Palestinian families are facing eviction and forced displacement from homes that Jewish settlers have claimed as their own.
The United Nations has urged Israel to call off the aforementioned forced evictions, per Al Jazeera, warning that they “may amount to war crimes” under international law. The AP says that an Israeli court is expected to issue a verdict on the evictions this coming Monday.