Temple Mount – Al Aqsa Mosque compound labeled diagram, 2022. (credit: Onceinawhile, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Following outreach from CAMERA, MS NOW commendably corrected the Aug. 13, 2026, article, “Huckabee issues rare rebuke of Israeli settlers’ siege of Palestinian homes in West Bank,” which had falsely charged and vilified Israelis by claiming they had “stormed” Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
The paragraph was originally used as background to illustrate heightened tensions in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, stating:
“In recent weeks, Israelis have stormed the mosque’s compound, known as the Temple Mount by Jews, joined at least once by Israel’s far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.” [emphasis added]
In response to CAMERA, MS NOW updated the text to read:
“Israeli Jews have drawn condemnation from Jordanian and Palestinian officials for praying inside the mosque’s compound, known as the Temple Mount by Jews, breaking a decades-old ‘status quo’ agreement that bars non-Muslim prayer at the site. The activists were joined at least once by Israel’s far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.”
Framing Jewish prayer as a “storming” echoes the historical trope popularized by Amin al-Husseini in 1929 to incite violent riots that left hundreds of Jews dead or injured in Hebron and Jerusalem. Extremists repeatedly use this trope to incite anti-Jewish violence, including on October 7, 2023, when approximately 6,000 terrorists invaded Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 in a mass atrocity.
In addition to the in-text correction, MS NOW appended a clarification note at the bottom of the article:
CLARIFICATION (Aug. 17, 2026, 2:04 p.m. ET): This story has been updated to clarify our reporting on events last month at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and to include additional context about the status quo agreement concerning the mosque.
CAMERA also asked MS NOW to state that the Temple Mount is the single holiest site in the world for Jews, considering the article identified the mosque compound as “one of the holiest sites for Muslims in the world.” MS NOW declined.
This crucial fact is central to the entire story of why some religious Jews are so determined to pray there.
Jewish tradition regards the site as the location of Mount Moriah, where the patriarch Abraham went to sacrifice his son Isaac at the behest of G-d.
The Jewish people built the First Temple at the site around 957 B.C.E., which the Babylonians destroyed in 586 B.C.E., before constructing the Second Temple, which the Romans destroyed in 70 C.E.
The existence of the Temples at the site is not merely biblical legend, rather significant historical and archaeological evidence has proven their presence.
This denial of a Jewish connection to the Temple Mount is a relic of the land of Israel’s extensive colonial past, as CAMERA has detailed. For centuries, successive ruling powers, including Islamic Caliphates, the Ottoman Empire and Jordan, enforced this erasure by physically barring Jews from accessing the Temple Mount, and in some eras, even the Western Wall.
Today, the Jordanian Waqf perpetuates that exclusion under the guise of the “status quo,” banning Jewish prayer and religious identity at the Jewish people’s holiest indigenous site. Archeologists have accused the Muslim Waqf of deliberately destroying ancient Jewish artifacts and structures to erase evidence of Jewish presence.
News outlets committed to holding power accountable should confront this legacy of erasure.
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, Reuters, CBS News, CNN, and many others have all explicitly acknowledged the singular significance of the Temple Mount to Judaism and the presence of the Temples there as a historical fact. MS NOW’s refusal makes it a clear outlier.
CAMERA calls on the network to abandon this fringe position and join the rest of the media landscape in recognizing the site’s true historical and religious reality.