150 Palestinians injured in clashes at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque | International

The tension has exploded at dawn this Friday in the Esplanade of the Mosques of Jerusalem, after two weeks of apparent calm since the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. At least 150 Palestinians have been injured in violent clashes after night prayers, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, around the Al Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site. The Israeli police reported that they had broken into the religious compound in response to the launch by hundreds of young people of stones and pyrotechnic rockets towards the Wailing Wall, the main place of worship of Judaism besieged at the foot of the Esplanade of the Mosques of the Old City , occupied by Israel since 1967. Three officers were also injured in the clashes, in which security forces fired rubber-coated bullets and tear gas and arrested “hundreds of rioters.”

The pitched battle takes place in the middle of Ramadan, at the beginning of Jewish Passover and in the middle of Christian Holy Week. The Islamist movement Hamas has threatened an armed response if groups of Messianic Jews carry out their plan to offer sacrifices of suckling lambs and kids, according to the Talmudic ritual abandoned almost two millennia ago, on the Esplanade of the Mosques, where the Hebrew tradition places the ancient temple of Jerusalem, the sanctum sanctorum of Judaism. Last year’s wave of clashes in Jerusalem during the Muslim holy month led to an Israeli military intervention in the Gaza Strip during which 250 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

Groups of youths masked with flags of Hamas and Fatah, the nationalist party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, barricaded themselves in the Al Aqsa compound at dawn to prevent the celebration of Jewish ritual sacrifices. The Wafq, the Islamic religious foundation that manages the Esplanade of the Mosques, assured that it had surprised two Israeli Jewish extremists posing as Muslims, the newspaper reports. Ha’aretz.

The security forces are on alert after the wave of attacks by Israeli Arab jihadists and radical Palestinians that has caused 14 deaths in Israeli cities in the last three weeks. In that same period, the interventions of the Army in the West Bank in areas where some of the attackers came from and in other incidents with the troops have claimed the lives of two dozen Palestinians. The Armed Forces have deployed 25 battalions (more than 5,000 soldiers) to reinforce security in the West Bank, which will remain sealed by troops during the first weekend of Jewish Passover. For the daily defense analyst Yediot Ahronot Yossi Yehoshua, this is one of the largest mobilizations in a decade.

The Israeli Public Security Minister, Omer Bar-Lev, assured that the Government guarantees freedom of worship in Jerusalem and that the police will prevent the escalation of violence from moving from the Esplanade of the Mosques to the Wailing Wall. The Palestinian Authority has warned through a spokesman for the Presidency that the provocations of extremist Jews threaten to lead to “a dangerous spiral impossible to control.”

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