Palestinians walk at the compound that houses Al-Aqsa Mosque, known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City May 21, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad

The Palestinian Authority (PA) misses no opportunity to libel Israel, and has no qualms about distorting basic facts of history to do so.

Some 57 years after the 1969 arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the PA’s official daily is still telling Palestinians that the man who set the mosque on fire was an “extremist Jew”:

57 years have passed, and we [still] have not forgotten the sight of thousands of our people rushing to extinguish the fire in the Al-Aqsa Mosque [set] by an extremist Jew with Australian citizenship — a terrorist named Michael Dennis [Rohan] — on the morning of August 21, 1969 …

Our people then managed to save what remained inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque before the flames consumed it, after fire trucks quickly arrived from Hebron, Bethlehem, various areas in the West Bank, and from Arab municipalities to save the mosque. This was despite attempts by the Israeli occupation authorities to stop them, and despite them cutting off the water supply around the mosque on the day of the fire itself. Fire trucks from the occupation municipality in Jerusalem also deliberately delayed arriving in order to avoid participating in extinguishing the fire.

This heinous act was carried out as part of a series of steps that the occupation has taken and continues to take since 1948, aiming to blur the Islamic cultural identity of the city of Jerusalem …

In addition, there have been increasing [Israeli] official and religious demands to build a synagogue inside the mosque in preparation for the establishment of the alleged Temple.

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 22, 2026]

The claim is false and extremely incendiary due to the sensitivity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Palestinian Muslim ideology.

Contemporary reports identified Rohan as an Australian Christian affiliated with the Church of God, a Protestant sect. At his trial, police testified that Rohan said God had commanded him to burn the mosque so that the Temple could be rebuilt on the site. (The Israeli court found him to have a mental health disorder and ordered him hospitalized. He was later sent back to Australia.)

The PA nevertheless transformed this Christian arsonist into a Jew and folded his crime into its familiar libel that Israel and Jews are conspiring to destroy Al-Aqsa and replace it with the Temple.

The official PA daily compounded the libel by claiming that Israeli authorities deliberately obstructed efforts to extinguish the fire, cut off the water supply, and intentionally delayed Jerusalem fire engines. However, Jerusalem firefighters actually arrived within minutes and fought the blaze.

Palestinian Media Watch will continue to expose this libel whenever the PA repeats it. By falsely turning a Christian arsonist into a Jew and portraying Israel as complicit in the burning of Al-Aqsa, the PA exploits the anniversary to demonize Jews and reinforce a libel used to legitimize terror against them.

The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article was originally published.