The building in Hebron is called Me'arat ha-Machpela, the Cave of the Machpelah or Cave of the Patriarchs, by Jews, and al-Haram al-Ibrahimi, the Sanctuary of Abraham, by Muslims. It is a functioning synagogue and a functioning mosque in the same Herodian enclosure, and the partition between them exists because of a mass shooting.
Both traditions hold that Abraham bought this ground as a burial place and that he, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah lie beneath it. Nobody has entered the cave itself in modern times.
Before 1967: the seventh step
Under Mamluk and then Ottoman rule, Jews were forbidden to enter the building. They were permitted to ascend an external staircase as far as the seventh step and pray there, pushing notes through an opening in the wall. The rule held for roughly seven hundred years.
It ended when Israel took Hebron in 1967. The staircase was subsequently demolished. It is worth stating both halves plainly: the exclusion was real and lasted centuries, and it was ended by military conquest, not by agreement.
25 February 1994
On the morning of 25 February 1994, during Ramadan, and on Purim, Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Israeli physician and a follower of Meir Kahane, walked into the mosque in army uniform carrying an assault rifle and opened fire on men at prayer. He killed 29 and wounded around 125 before survivors overpowered and killed him. More Palestinians died in the protests over the following days.
The Shamgar Commission, chaired by the President of the Supreme Court, concluded that Goldstein had acted alone and that the security arrangements at the site had been inadequate, intelligence had been oriented toward attacks on Jews and had not seriously considered the reverse.
Goldstein's grave in Kiryat Arba became a pilgrimage site for a small far-right constituency, and Israel later legislated to remove the shrine built around it.
The arrangement that followed
The response was to partition the building. Roughly four-fifths of the interior was allocated to Muslim worship and the remainder to Jewish worship, with separate entrances, permanent Israeli military checkpoints, and metal detectors. The tombs of Isaac and Rebecca fall on the Muslim side and are opened to Jewish worshippers only about ten days a year; certain days are reserved the other way.
The Israeli military controls access to the whole structure. The Islamic Waqf administers the mosque portion.
The Hebron Protocol of 17 January 1997 divided the city itself: H1, about eighty per cent, under Palestinian Authority control, and H2, containing the shrine, the old market and the Israeli settlement in the city centre, under Israeli control. Palestinian residents of H2 live under movement restrictions, with streets near the shrine closed to them entirely; the old commercial centre has largely emptied. Israel describes the regime as necessary to protect the settler community after 1994 and against subsequent attacks. Palestinians describe it as collective punishment and the settlement itself as the cause.
In 2017 UNESCO inscribed the Old Town of Hebron/Al-Khalil as a World Heritage Site nominated by the State of Palestine, and placed it simultaneously on the List of World Heritage in Danger. Israel and the United States rejected the inscription as politically motivated and as slighting the Jewish connection to the site. The nomination's supporters replied that the listing concerned an Ottoman-era urban fabric under threat and did not adjudicate anyone's religious claim.
Nothing about this building is settled, and any account that reads as settled has left something out.