allowed to enter with a colleague through the insecure crater into the cavern underneath in order to explore the excavation tunnel presumably to be assigned to Bliss and Dickey. In the recent years the board of cemetery paid again some attention to its neglected Jarmaleh Cemetery. The enclosing fence of the Jarmaleh Cemetery has mostly collapsed. Almost all headstones there have been destroyed in wanton vandalism. The graves are overgrown and partially covered with rubbish. The last burial there dates back to 2003. 2020s In January 2023, 30 graves in the cemetery were vandalised by two teenagers. The Israel Police are investigating. Ownership and usage Under Ottoman law corporations could not own land, but only natural persons. As stated by the original deed in Arabic and French, issued on the occasion of the land acquisition in 1848, Mount Zion Cemetery was converted into an inalienable religious waqf endowment in favour of the Injiliyyun (; i.e. Protestants) as its beneficiaries, represented by their respective spiritual head () as mutevelli (, i.e. administrator, trustee). A waqf may have beneficiaries, who take usufruct of it, but nobody may dispose of it as property. However, in 1853 Gobat separated a part of the cemetery, which had not yet been used for burials, in order to domicile the Bishop Gobat School (Bischof-Gobat-Schule; est. 1847) there, a clear contravention of the waqf deed, which demanded a use as cemetery. With the dissolution of the contract on the joint bishopric in 1886 diplomatic notes were exchanged confirming the status quo of the cemetery with its ambiguities. Paul von Hatzfeldt, German ambassador in London, stated "that the [Prussian] Royal Government takes it for granted that the use of the churchyard for its proper purpose by both Communities on equal footing as well as the equal right of the clergymen of each to perform the proper service shall continue until a possible agreement shall have been arrived at by the two Communities." British Foreign Secretary Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh replied: "The Archbishop [of Canterbury, Archibald Tait,] most readily concurs in the desire expressed in Count Hatzfeldt's letter as to the future harmonious cooperation of the Churches and the continued common use of the churchyard as hitherto." So technically the cemetery continued to be used and administered by the Anglican Bishopric of Jerusalem and the old-Prussian Evangelical Church, represented by the Evangelical pastor of Jerusalem (ranked provost since