They keep the Al-Aqsa Mosque like a fortress. Barricaded inside the building, in this third holy place of Islam, a small group of Palestinians set off fireworks at regular intervals, Sunday morning, April 17 at the Israeli police surrounding them. These projectiles produce small clouds of smoke, colored sparks around police officers who want to be unperturbed. Some aim 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 through, visiting what is to them the Temple Mount, after the closure of the Easter weekend. In recent years, these activists have broken the prevailing “status quo,” which allows Jews to visit the mountain but not pray there. Accompanied 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 forbid their highly incendiary devotions.
At dawn on Sunday, police say the besieged Palestinians tried to block these visitors’ passage to the Maghreb’s door, which opens out to a rickety wooden bridge spanning the Wailing Wall, a remnant of the second Temple. To make them 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 eventually cut off the mosque’s loudspeakers after the besieged there appealed to the faithful to join them, and then a prayer.
However, Israeli authorities on Sunday hoped for a return to “normal” after the violent repression carried out by the police here on Friday. Even before Passover, which coincides with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan for the first time since 1991, a call by Jewish extremists to sacrifice an Easter lamb on the esplanade had spread like wildfire in the Palestinian territories, which had been occupied since 1967. . This usual provocation had not the slightest chance of success.
But it resonated as the military is deployed en masse in the West Bank in response to a spate of attacks that have killed 14 people in Israeli cities since March 22. At least 15 Palestinians were killed in these raids in the West Bank. The army carries out arrests and punitive expeditions against the relatives of the attackers. It takes position on the roads, near the colonies and along the wall that encloses the territories.
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