They hold Al-Aqsa Mosque as a fort. Barricaded inside the building, in this third holy place of Islam, a small group of Palestinians fires firecrackers at regular intervals, Sunday April 17 in the morning, against the Israeli police, who surround them. These projectiles produce small clouds of smoke, colored sparks around police officers who want to be imperturbable. Some point their guns at broken windows, waiting for one of the besieged to poke their heads out. But they don’t attack.
If the police are deployed in this way on the esplanade of the Mosques, it is to let tourists and Jewish worshipers pass through, visiting what is for them the Temple Mount, after the closure of the Easter weekend. In recent years, these activists have broken the “status quo” in force, which allows Jews to visit the Mount, but not to pray there. Escorted and protected by the police, they pray every day in normal times, and study for a long time near the Golden Gate. It is a challenge to the main Jewish religious authorities, who ban their highly inflammable devotions.
Sunday at dawn, the police say that the besieged Palestinians tried to block the passage of these visitors to the door of the Maghrebians, on which emerges a rickety wooden bridge which spans the Wailing Wall, a remnant of the second Temple. To allow them to come, she pushed back, sometimes violently, the Muslim faithful 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 cut the loudspeakers of the mosque, after the besieged there launched an appeal to the faithful to join them, then a prayer.
The Israeli authorities, however, hoped for a return to “normal” on Sunday, after the violent repression that the police carried out here on Friday. Even before Passover, which coincides for the first time since 1991 with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a call from Jewish extremists to sacrifice a Paschal lamb on the esplanade had spread like wildfire in the Palestinian territories. , occupied since 1967. This habitual provocation did not have the slightest chance of succeeding.
But it resonated as the army deploys 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 the West Bank during these raids. The army carries out arrests and punitive expeditions against the relatives of the attackers. It takes position on the roads, near the settlements and along the wall that encloses the territories.
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