"Hamas wanted to defeat us. "Al-Aqsa Flood," they called it. And today, we are the masters of the Temple Mount! We are the masters of the prisons. We have turned the lives of their terrorists into hell. We distributed weapons and established civilian emergency response squads. Three years later, the people of Israel are on the path to total victory! And on this holiday, I pray here on the Temple Mount, at the most important place, for total victory, complete redemption, death to all terrorists, and sovereignty here, at the most important place for the Jewish people. They wanted to win. We defeated them, first and foremost, here on the Temple Mount."
On the morning of Monday, September 28, 2026 — during Sukkot, and three years after the October 7, 2023 attack — National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, chairman of Otzma Yehudit, ascended the Temple Mount, prayed there, and delivered the remarks above on camera, calling for Israeli sovereignty over the site. He opened by saying: "October 7 was an immense pain, a terrible pain. But today, three years later, it is the Sukkot holiday, a festival of joy, and we can be happy about many things that have happened since then." The specific claims in the middle of the speech are policies with records attached. On the prisons: as National Security Minister he reduced shower times for security prisoners, closed prison bakeries and banned family visits beginning in 2023. His separate ban on Knesset members visiting security prisoners was struck down by Israel's Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, in April 2026. On the weapons: he loosened firearm licensing so that the number of localities whose residents are eligible for gun licenses rose from six in 2021 to 126 in 2026, and stood up armed civilian rapid-response squads. On the Temple Mount: Jewish prayer at the site is barred under the status quo arrangement administered by the Jordanian Waqf, and a serving Israeli minister praying there and declaring Israeli mastery of it is a change to that arrangement asserted by conduct rather than by legislation. The same week, Israeli settlers in the northern West Bank threw stones at and assaulted IDF soldiers and Border Police who had arrived to restore order, and set fire to property. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a written statement: "I strongly condemn the violent riots in Samaria overnight and the harm inflicted on the security forces who arrived at the scene to maintain law and order," calling for the rioters to be "prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law" and saying "the fringe group of rioters does not represent the law-abiding settler community in Judea and Samaria." President Isaac Herzog issued the statement above. Earlier in September, Ben-Gvir had said publicly: "We are back to the days when Netanyahu doesn't want to be photographed with me," and "I am the most protected minister in Israel, the most threatened minister in Israel. They have tried to kill me ten times."
Ran the headline sentence and dropped the inventory. "We are the masters here" and "we are the masters of the Temple Mount" were the quoted lines across Israeli and international coverage, and the framing was the provocation — a far-right minister at a contested holy site on a holiday, calling for sovereignty, three years after October 7. That framing is correct and it is also the least verifiable part of the speech. The three sentences that follow it are not rhetoric; they are a list of accomplished administrative changes, and two of them have numbers. Six localities to 126 is a 21-fold expansion of firearm license eligibility, executed by a minister who in the same breath said he had "distributed weapons and established civilian emergency response squads," delivered in the same week that armed settlers in the West Bank assaulted Israeli soldiers and burned property, and the connection between those two facts was raised by no one. The prison claim is the same: "we are the masters of the prisons" describes a specific set of measures, one component of which Israel's own High Court struck down five months ago — a fact that appeared in a single outlet's background paragraph and in no coverage of the speech itself. And the structural detail went entirely unreported: a serving cabinet minister prayed at a site where the state he serves prohibits his prayer, said so on video, and the status quo was not mentioned. Separately, Netanyahu and Herzog both condemned settler violence against the security forces that week in writing. Neither was asked whether the minister responsible for the police shares their view, and the minister was not asked either.
Entry #62, four days before this, recorded two ministers — Smotrich and Strock — writing the same cabinet letter twice to block Gaza reconstruction, the second time against 66 costed projects. This file keeps returning to the same mechanism in the Israeli coalition: the quotable line is the provocation, and the operative content is the administrative act underneath it, which is why the coverage and the record diverge so reliably. Here the divergence is unusually clean because the minister enumerated it himself. He was not accused of expanding gun licensing twenty-one-fold or of running the prisons as punishment; he announced both, on camera, at the holiest contested site in the region, as evidence of victory. Nothing in this entry is alleged and nothing is leaked. The 126 localities, the shower times, the bakeries, the family-visit ban, the High Court reversal in April, the squads — all of it is policy on the record, and the man who holds the portfolio presented it as a list of achievements in a speech that was covered as a stunt. The reason it matters now rather than in 2023 is the week it was given in. Israeli settlers assaulted Israeli soldiers in the West Bank in the same days; the Prime Minister and the President both issued statements demanding prosecution; the minister who commands the police stood on the Temple Mount and said he had handed out the weapons. No outlet put those three documents in the same story, and all three are public.