Following Ya’alon’s order, the PLO Executive Committee held an emergency meeting in Ramallah and called for “confronting Israeli terror schemes” against Islamic holy sites, while Hamas said that the government’s move was tantamount to a “declaration of war”. In practice some Muslims see Jewish attempts to pray on the Temple Mount as an assault on their religious and cultural identity.
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An additional 800 officers are deployed throughout the city, and police placed age restrictions on males attending Friday prayers on the Temple Mount to 40 and older, after days of intervention to rein in Palestinian rioters on the contested site.
“If you start rumours that Israel is changing the status quo, and putting fear into the heart of many Muslims, all you do is incite violence”.
The UN Security Council appealed for calm and restraint Thursday after three days of clashes this week at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque compound between Israeli police and Muslim protesters.
“We expect our friends, our partners in the council of religious leaders in Israel, to condemn all those who desecrate the holy places and bring into them weapons of various kinds, and to prevent such phenomena”, David Lau and Yitzhak Yosef said in a joint statement. Some ultranationalist Israeli politicians have also joined visitors, fueling Muslim fears that Israel wants to take over the site.
The Al-Aqsa Mosque is considered holy by both Muslims and Jews and access to the site has always been a flash point between the Palestinians and Israelis. “Every martyr (Shahid) will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah”, Abbas said in aspeech, segments of which were aired on official PA TV and posted on his website.
The unrest has drawn global attention; clashes at the site have in the past led to wider outbreaks of violence in the region.
Also on Thursday evening, a bus driver was injured in a stone throwing attack near the West bank village of Binyamin, Israeli media outlets reported.
Israeli police use stun grenades to disperse Palestinian demonstrators in the Old City of Jerusalem during scuffles on the Temple Mount on September 15, 2015. The Temple Mount has a special status under Jordanian custodianship while Israel controls security. Twenty members of the Likud Youth organisation visited the Temple Mount this week in spite of pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cancel the visit.
The global Union of Muslim Scholars is calling on Palestinians to “Rescue al-Aqsa” and rise up against Israel, according to several Twitter posts translated by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT).
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The clashes began Sunday morning, with security forces seizing pipe bombs at the site in an operation carried out hours before Jews prepared to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.
1 Comment on this Post
Dov
The name of the village where the bus driver drove the 143 bus to is Geva Binyamin not Binyamin. It is mentioned prophetically in Zecharia 14 as being the northern most neighborhood in Jerusalem at the end of days. The stoning of the bus was near the Arab village of Hizma, and the bus driver drove the bus to Geva Binyamin to save his life and the lives of the passengers while holding his bleeding eye. Oh by the way, my son was one of the passengers on the bus.