Police installed metal detectors at the entrance days after an attack in which three Arab Israelis killed two Israeli police in the area. During that same period, Israeli forces have killed more than 255 Palestinians, majority said by Israel to be attackers while others were killed in clashes with Israeli forces.
Escalating Israeli-Palestinian tensions over the Holy Land’s most contested shrine boiled over into violence Friday that killed six people – three Palestinians in street clashes in Jerusalem and three Israelis in a stabbing attack at a West Bank settlement.
A second Palestinian was killed by gunfire in east Jerusalem, while a third was shot dead in Abu Dis in the occupied West Bank, the ministry said, without providing details.
It comes after Israeli Arabs attacked a holy shrine revered by both Muslims and Jews last week, killing two policemen.
The Israeli army said in a statement on Friday that the four victims were Israeli civilians and that the assailant was also shot.
And they did: by the day’s end Israeli forces and armed settlers had killed three young Palestinian men and injured more than 450 others, some of them very seriously.
One Palestinian man told NBC News that he had passed through security but had been prevented from praying next to the Al Aqsa mosque even though he is over 50-years-old.
He was taken to hospital, but his condition was unclear.
A dispute over metal detectors has escalated into a new showdown between Israel and the Muslim world over a Jerusalem shrine that has triggered major Israeli-Palestinian confrontations in the past.
They believe the metal detectors are an Israeli attempt to impose its sovereignty over the site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif.
Shortly afterwards, it emerged that three Israelis had been stabbed to death at a settlement in the West Bank.
Israeli forces attacked the worshippers, majority elderly people, and dispersed them using all kinds of brute force, including rubber-coated metal bullets, tear gas, concussion bombs, beating and often live bullets.
Israeli high school students working in conjunction with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have unearthed an “impressively large” 2,700-year-old.
Palestinian protesters were angered by the additional security measures, regarding them as a thinly-veiled step, by the Israeli regime, to assert greater control over the al-Aqsa mosque compound. They refused to enter, preferring to pray outside, in some cases filling the narrow alleyways of the Old City’s Muslim quarter. The uncle said his nephew had endured two weeks in detention and was violently interrogated about alleged plans to attack Israelis before he was released. But using the guise of “security”, Israel has ensured that we, Palestinians, live as prisoners in our homeland. Hamas spokesman Husam Badran said: “We will continue fighting the occupation in all points of friction for the support of Al-Aqsa”.
The controversy has resonated beyond Israel and the Palestinian territories, with the U.S. and the UN Middle East envoy expressing concern.