Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls

The Old City of Jerusalem is holy to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Within its walls lie the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound with the Dome of the Rock, and UNESCO counts 220 historic monuments. Most archaeologists believe that the City of David, south of the Temple Mount, was the core of the town in the Bronze and Iron Ages. After the Neo-Babylonian Empire destroyed the First Temple around 586 BC, the Second Temple was completed in 516 BC, and King Herod later expanded the Temple Mount and rebuilt the Temple.

In 637 Muslim forces under the second caliph, Umar, took over the city, and in the reign of the caliph Abd al-Malik the Dome of the Rock was built in the form that largely survives. The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099, and Saladin retook it on 2 October 1187. In 1535 the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ordered the ruined walls rebuilt, producing the present circuit, 4,018 m long, on average 12 m high, with 34 watchtowers.

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War the Old City came under Jordanian control, and in the 1967 Six-Day War Israel occupied East Jerusalem. Jordan proposed the Old City for the World Heritage List in 1980, and it was inscribed with its walls in 1981. In 1982 it was added to the List of World Heritage in Danger at Jordan's request; the United States objected that Jordan had no standing and that the consent of Israel, which effectively controlled the city, was required. UNESCO's list gives its location not as a country but as "Jerusalem (Site proposed by Jordan)".