Mount Zion (Hebrew: הַר צִיּוֹן, Har Ṣīyyōn; Arabic: جبل صهيون, Jabal Sahyoun) is a hill in Jerusalem, located just outside the walls of the Old City to the south.

[1] In the second half of the First Temple period, the city expanded westward and its defensive walls were extended to include the entire Western Hill behind them.

[13] During the 1948 war, Mount Zion was conquered by the Harel Brigade on May 18, 1948, and became the only part of the Old City to stay in Israeli hands until the armistice.

At first it was linked to the Jewish neighborhood of Yemin Moshe across the Valley of Hinnom via a narrow tunnel, but eventually an alternative was needed to evacuate the wounded and transport supplies to soldiers on Mount Zion.

The cable car was only used at night and lowered into the valley during the day to escape detection; it is still in place at what is now the Mount Zion Hotel.

Until East Jerusalem was captured by Israel in the Six-Day War, Israelis would climb to the rooftop of David's Tomb to pray.

Important sites on Mount Zion are Dormition Abbey, the Armenian Monastery of St. Saviour, King David's Tomb and the Room of the Last Supper.

Another place of interest is the Catholic cemetery where Oskar Schindler, a Righteous Gentile who saved the lives of 1,200 Jews in the Holocaust, is buried.

These include explorers and archaeologists such as: Flinders Petrie, Charles Frederick Tyrwhitt Drake, James Duncan, Clarence Stanley Fisher, Charles Lambert and James Leslie Starkey; the architect Conrad Schick; and pioneers in the fields of medicine, education, religion, diplomacy and social services such as James Edward Hanauer, Ernest Masterman, John Nicholayson, Paul Palmer, Max Sandreczky, Johann Ludwig Schneller, Horatio G. Spafford, author of the hymn It Is Well With My Soul.

The cemetery is also the final resting place for a number of soldiers who fought in the First World War, as well as members of the Palestinian Police who served under the British mandate.

In 1874, an Englishman, Henry Maudsley, discovered a large segment of rock scarp and numerous ancient dressed stones on Mount Zion that were believed to be the base of Josephus's First Wall.

Several of these stones were used to construct a retaining wall outside the main gate of the Bishop Gobat school (later known as the American Institute of Holy Land Studies and Jerusalem University College).