Israel also said the United Nations must condemn Palestinian stabbing and shooting attacks that have left 11 Israelis dead in the past month.
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Since October 1, 56 Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli forces while 1,900 Palestinians, including 391 children, have been injured. An Israeli Arab attacker was also killed.
Hundreds of them rallied in the city, carrying posters with pictures of Palestinians killed in recent weeks, Press TV reported. Eleven Israelis have been killed over the same period.
The Jews, who call it Temple Mount or Har Ha-Bayit in Hebrew, also consider this site to be sacred to their beliefs.
When an Arab citizen of Israel opened fire at a bus station in southern Israel recently, killing an Israeli soldier and wounding several people, a private security guard shot an Eritrean migrant he thought was an attacker.
“The High Commissioner said that this crisis is unsafe in the extreme because it is a confrontation drawn in part from that most combustible of human emotional mechanisms: fear”, said United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric Wednesday at a daily briefing.
Abbas called for “peaceful popular resistance”, lashed out at Israel’s “oppressive war machine” and said “the criminal acts of settlers must be stopped”.
Attacks continued Tuesday, first as two Palestinian assailants tried to stab an Israeli man near the Jewish settlements in the Gush Etzion area of the West Bank, and later in Hebron, where a Palestinian attempted to stab a soldier.
“Some of these people were stabbed, shot, and even beaten to death by members of the public, both Israeli and Palestinian”.
Lakin was an elementary school principal in the US and taught English in mixed classes of Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem after moving to Israel in 1984.
Increasing numbers of religious Jews visiting Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque plaza, Islam’s holiest site outside Saudi Arabia and revered in Judaism as the location of two destroyed biblical temples, have spurred Palestinian allegations that Israel is violating a “status quo” under which Jewish prayer there is banned. It is “a new trap by Israelis” created to “thwart the Intifada”, Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki told Voice of Palestine radio.
During the past week, the US government has worked closely with the Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians to ease the tensions across Israel and the West Bank through constructive solutions aimed at ending the violence.
Abbas on Wednesday accused the Israelis of acting “as a state above global law”, and said it has “recently stepped up its criminal practices to the point where it performed extrajudicial killings of defenceless Palestinian civilians, (and) detained their corpses, including children”.
And after Israel agreed on Saturday to install surveillance cameras at Al-Aqsa, which US Secretary of State John Kerry described as a “game changer”, the measure quickly hit its first obstacle.
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Israel has pledged to abide by the long-standing arrangement at the site in Jerusalem’s walled Old City.
