Israeli extremists, under the protection of Israeli police forces, stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on the morning of 15 May.

Colonial Israeli settlers storming Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque until these moments. pic.twitter.com/sgqO6PYGDz

— AlQastal News (@QastalNewsEn) May 15, 2022

The Israeli settlers performed Talmudic rituals in the Islamic holy site.

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas warned that desecrating Al-Aqsa Mosque could lead to an escalation of tensions and trigger retaliatory strikes against the occupation.

“The extremist statements calling on [Jews] to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque on Nakba Day with the approval of the occupation forces are provocations and will lead to a clash that the Zionist occupier will be held responsible for,” Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem warned.

The provocative storming of Al-Aqsa occurred on the anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, which marked the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Palestine in 1948, and was executed by the massacre of Palestinians, in an ethnic cleansing campaign across the country.

The Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe, led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes in fear of the violent tactics used by UK-backed Jewish militias.

For 74 years, Palestinians and their supporters around the world have upheld the memory of these massacres and ethnic cleansing campaigns to remind others of the manner in which the state of Israel was created.

On 15 May, demonstrations around the world were held to commemorate the Nakba anniversary.

Demonstrations were held in London, Oslo, Sydney, New York, Paris, and elsewhere.

However, this year, not all people around the world were freely able to protest the historical atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinian people.

A court in Germany upheld a ban on all Nakba Day demonstrations in Berlin following a ruling issued on 13 May, claiming the demonstrations pose a risk for so-called “inflammatory” and “anti-Semitic” speech.

Event organizers slammed the ruling, calling it an attack on freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.

“The events were banned under false pretexts, in a move that is a confiscation of people’s right to commemorate their forced displacement from their villages and cities,” Hamas spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanoua stated on 14 May in reaction to the Berlin court ruling.

In occupied Palestine, activists were attacked by Israeli forces on Tel Aviv University campus for holding Nakba Day demonstrations.

Nakba Day mobilizations come in the wake of the murder of journalist Shireen Abu Aqla Nasri by Israeli forces on 11 May and the brutal attack by Israeli forces on her funeral procession.