Israeli police in the Old City of Jerusalem, Sunday April 17, 2022. AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP
They keep Al-Aqsa Mosque as a fortress. Barricaded inside the building, at this third holy site of Islam, a small group of Palestinians periodically fired firecrackers at surrounding Israeli police on the morning of Sunday, April 17. These projectiles create small puffs of smoke, colored sparks around cops trying to be steadfast. Some point their guns at broken windows, waiting for one of the besieged to stick their head through. But they don’t attack.
If the police are deployed in this way on the esplanade of the mosques, they should let through tourists and Jewish worshipers visiting the Temple Mount after the Easter weekend closure. In recent years, these activists have broken the “status quo” that allows Jews to visit the mountain but not to pray there. Escorted and protected by the police, they pray every day during normal times and spend long hours studying near the Golden Gate. It is a challenge to the main Jewish religious authorities who are banning their highly inflammatory devotions.
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Police say at dawn on Sunday the besieged Palestinians tried to block these visitors’ passage to the Maghreb’s door, which features a rickety wooden bridge spanning the Western Wall, a remnant of the Second Temple. In order to let them come, she pushed back, sometimes violently, the Muslim worshipers on the Esplanade. It also temporarily prohibited those who were in the Old City from entering the holy places through two main gates. She finally turned off the loudspeakers in the mosque after the besieged launched a call for the faithful to move in, then a prayer.
However, the Israeli authorities hoped for a return to “normal” on Sunday after the violent repression carried out by the police here on Friday. Even before Passover, which coincides with the Muslim month of fasting Ramadan for the first time since 1991, a call by Jewish extremists to sacrifice a Easter lamb on the Esplanade had spread like wildfire in the Palestinian territories, which had been occupied since 1967, and had not the slightest chance of Success.
But it resonated as the army deployed massively in the West Bank, responding to a wave of attacks that have killed 14 people in Israeli cities since March 22. At least fifteen Palestinians were killed in these attacks in the West Bank. The army carries out arrests and punitive expeditions against the relatives of the attackers. It positions itself on the roads, near the settlements and along the wall that encloses the territories.
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