THERE is something profoundly barbaric about preventing a besieged people from reaching the House of the Almighty. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has now denied Palestinians the Haj pilgrimage for the third consecutive year – turning one of Islam’s holiest obligations into another casualty of occupation, siege, and war. More than 10,000 Palestinians have been barred from undertaking the sacred journey to Makkah.
Elderly believers who waited decades for this moment now face the possibility of dying without fulfilling one of the central pillars of their faith. More than 70 selected pilgrims already have. This is not merely a restriction on movement. It is the deliberate humiliation of a people’s spiritual existence. They died waiting – not because of fate alone, but because siege and war transformed worship into an impossibility. Some had saved for decades. Others waited years for their names to emerge through the official Haj selection process. They died carrying unfulfilled prayers.
Trapped Amid Ruins
Israel’s closure of the Rafah crossing and other border points has completely halted religious travel from Gaza, severing Palestinians from one of the deepest expressions of Muslim spiritual life. Families who spent years saving for a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage now find themselves trapped amid ruins, displacement camps, starvation, and grief. For many elderly Palestinians, Haj is not tourism or leisure. It is the culmination of a lifetime of faith, sacrifice, and hope. Many dream their entire lives of standing before the Holy Kaaba even once before death. Today, that dream is dying under siege.
The suffering extends beyond the pilgrimage itself. Gazans have also been unable to perform the traditional sacrifice during Eid Al-Adha because Israel’s military assault has devastated the livestock sector while restrictions on imports continue to suffocate civilian life. Sacred seasons that ordinarily bring prayer, charity, communal gathering, and spiritual renewal now arrive amid hunger, displacement, mourning, and fear. Even the rituals through which communities express gratitude, remembrance, and solidarity have been shattered by war.
According to Palestinian religious authorities and humanitarian organisations, more than 10,000 Palestinians have now been prevented from performing Haj over the course of three consecutive years because of Israel’s closure of crossings and its continuing military assault on Gaza. The blockade has effectively imprisoned an entire civilian population, denying them not only freedom of movement but also access to one of the holiest obligations in Islam.
A study this month by the Palestinian Centre for Political Studies (PCPS), authored by Khaled Abu Amer, describes the destruction of Gaza’s Haj and Umrah sector as a form of “structural economic genocide.” The report documents the collapse of all 78 licensed Haj and Umrah travel companies operating in Gaza. Most offices were damaged or destroyed during Israel’s assault, according to Mohammed al-Astal, head of the Association of Haj and Umrah Companies in Gaza. What has been destroyed is not simply an economic sector, but an entire social and spiritual infrastructure that connected Palestinians to the wider Muslim World.
Assault on Collective Identity
Yet what is unfolding cannot be understood only in economic or administrative terms. The denial of Haj represents something deeper: an assault on spiritual dignity, emotional survival, and collective identity. It strikes at the deepest layers of human longing – the desire to stand before God in prayer, repentance, equality, and peace alongside millions of believers from across the world.
For Palestinians in Gaza, religion is not separate from daily survival. Faith sustains dignity amid siege, bombardment, displacement, and grief. Mosques and churches are not only places of worship; they are spaces of memory, refuge, mourning, solidarity, and hope. To deny a population access to worship while simultaneously destroying homes, hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches is to attack both physical and spiritual existence. The siege enters not only streets and borders, but also memory, ritual, mourning, and hope itself.
The story of an elderly Gazan woman Hanan al-Hams sitting in a tent beside the ruins of her destroyed home while mourning both her son and the loss of her pilgrimage captures this tragedy with painful clarity. Israel’s war has not merely reduced infrastructure to rubble; it has invaded the intimate emotional world of Palestinians, severing their connection to sacred rituals, communal belonging, and spiritual healing.
International law is unambiguous on these matters. Freedom of religion or belief is a fundamental human right protected under Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. These provisions guarantee every person the right to manifest religion through worship, observance, practice, and teaching. Preventing civilians from undertaking Haj through prolonged siege and border closures is therefore not a simple administrative restriction. It is the denial of a universally protected religious freedom.
The blockade also raises grave concerns under international humanitarian law. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment and measures of intimidation against civilian populations. No protected people may be punished for offences they did not personally commit. Yet Gaza’s entire civilian population continues to endure restrictions imposed through siege, bombardment, closure, displacement, and deprivation. The collective denial of movement for worship, pilgrimage, education, healthcare, and livelihood reveals the architecture of punishment imposed upon an occupied people.
Wider Process of Social Destruction
International humanitarian law also prohibits the destruction of civilian infrastructure except where absolutely required by military necessity. The collapse of Gaza’s Haj and Umrah institutions, the destruction of mosques and churches, the devastation of livestock necessary for Eid sacrifice, and the obstruction of humanitarian and religious movement collectively point toward a wider process of social destruction. The siege has transformed everyday civilian life into a condition of prolonged humiliation.
But beyond legal violations lies an even more profound moral question about the nature of power itself. Israel repeatedly presents itself internationally as a “Jewish State,” invoking religious identity in political discourse and diplomatic justification. Yet the systematic denial of Muslims’ access to one of Islam’s holiest obligations, alongside repeated attacks on churches, mosques, cemeteries, and religious institutions in Gaza and the West Bank, exposes a dangerous contradiction. A state that invokes faith while humiliating another people’s faith risks transforming religion into an instrument of domination rather than a source of ethical responsibility.
Judaism, like Islam and Christianity, contains deep traditions of justice, mercy, and protection for the oppressed. Many Jewish scholars, rabbis, Holocaust survivors, and human rights defenders themselves have condemned the occupation and the siege precisely because they believe such policies betray Jewish ethical teachings. What is unfolding in Gaza is therefore not a defence of religion, but the political weaponisation of religious identity to legitimise exclusion, collective punishment, and domination.
Nor are Muslims alone in this suffering. Palestinian Christians have repeatedly faced restrictions on access to Jerusalem and Bethlehem during Easter and Christmas observances. Churches in Gaza have been struck during military operations, and Christian families, like their Muslim neighbours, endure siege, displacement, fear, and grief. The occupation wounds the shared spiritual fabric of an entire people.
The denial of Haj must therefore be understood as part of a much larger architecture of dehumanisation. A people deprived of worship, pilgrimage, sacred gathering, celebration, mourning, and spiritual continuity are not merely being controlled politically; they are being pushed toward cultural and emotional annihilation. The siege seeks not only to dominate territory but to exhaust the human spirit itself.
Systematic Erosion of Human Dignity
What is happening in Gaza today is not simply the destruction of buildings or infrastructure. It is the systematic erosion of the conditions necessary for human dignity. A people unable to bury their dead properly, unable to gather for prayer, unable to celebrate sacred festivals, unable to travel for pilgrimage, and unable even to secure bread or medicine are being stripped of the rhythms through which humanity sustains itself.
No state that systematically humiliates another people’s faith, blocks their access to sacred obligations, destroys places of worship, and weaponizes siege against civilians can credibly claim moral superiority or civilisational virtue. This is not a security policy. It is domination hardened into a permanent structure.
A state that bombs mosques and churches, starves civilians during sacred seasons, destroys the means for Eid sacrifice, and imprisons an entire population behind military barriers cannot cloak itself in the language of religious morality while violating the ethical foundations common to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity alike.
Weaponisation of Faith
What is unfolding in Gaza is not the defence of faith, but the weaponisation of faith by a militarised state that invokes Jewish identity while violating the sacred principles of justice, mercy, and human dignity.
The denial of Haj to Palestinians is therefore more than political repression. It is an assault on the sacred itself. It is an attempt to break not only bodies, but belief.
History will remember this siege not simply as a military campaign, but as a war carried out against the human spirit – against prayer, dignity, mourning, memory, and the right of a people to stand before God in peace.
___________________
Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
