More than 150 Palestinians have been injured in clashes with Israeli police at the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, Palestinian medics say.
Israeli police said officers entered the site after coming under attack with fireworks, stones and other objects.
Three Israeli police were hurt, they said.
The flashpoint site is deeply important to Muslims and Jews, who know it as the Temple Mount, and is at the heart of competing historical claims.
The author goes on to specify many other attempts at Zionist destruction of al-Aqsa.The Israeli attempts to wreck the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy Dome of the Rock have passed through several stages, the most important of which are as follows:
1. On 21 August, 1969, the occupation authorities were involved in an attempt to burn down the Al-Aqsa Mosque. That act of arson destroyed the historic Salahuddin pulpit and sizable parts of the Mosque. The fire caused serious cracks in a number of the Mosques’ pillars which resulted, in turn, in the collapse of a portion of the ceiling. The Arab inhabitants of Jerusalem confronted this abominable act of arson without assistance from occupation authorities by transporting water buckets by hand until they succeeded in extinguishing the fire.
2. Early in 1980, an attempt was made to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque by explosives in a conspiracy plan for execution by Rabbi Meir Kahane. The explosives were discovered minutes before detonation at a distance of 50 metres from the Mosque.
3. Jewish religious fanatics have repeatedly attempted to conduct prayers within spacious areas of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, similar to what they had done within the Ibrahimi holy sanctuary at Hebron.
The Jewish extremists, furthermore, attempted on 9 August, 1981 to enter the holy sanctuary in big numbers and on several occasions and from various gates leading to Al-Aqsa holy sanctuary to conduct prayers therein. They broke the Magharbah Gate, the Iron Gate and the ascended to the Tankinazia building in which the occupation authorities are garrisoned and which overlooks the open spaces of the Mosque. But the Muslim worshippers confronted those transgressors and repelled their intrusions.
4. Many Israeli diggings were made in the vicinity, as well as under the foundations of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy Dome of the Rock.
He gives many other instances of Zionist leaders openly admitting that they want to destroy al-Aqsa to build the Third Temple.The criminal conspiracy to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild on its site the Jewish Temple is as old as the Zionist program. Zionists declared that “there could be no Zion without Jerusalem, and no Jerusalem without the Jewish Temple.” Zionists have never concealed their criminal objective, and many of their political and religious leaders have declared that to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque and to rebuild the Jewish Temple on its site is one of their most cherished aims.
The following facts are a few of many which conclusively prove the Zionist conspiracy concerning Al-Aqsa Mosque.
In a report dated July, 1920, General L. Boiz, Director General for the British Administration in Palestine, stated that the Chief Rabbi in Palestine, Abraham Ishaq Kook, together with the Rabbinate and Mr. Ussichkin, vice-president of the Zionist Organization, officially requested the British Government and the British Administration in Palestine to turn over to Jews all the area of Al-Aqsa Mosque.
In 1922, Lord Melchett (formerly Sir Alfred Mond), member of the British Cabinet, made the following statement:
“The day on which the Jewish Temple will be rebuilt has become very near. I shall dedicate the rest of my life for the reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple on the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
Basically, these Christian Zionists want to rebuild the Third Temple just to hasten the End of Times.Proponents of contemporary Christian Zionism insist that the movement is mandated in both Old and New Testaments, which, they claim, are the source of their motivation (Wagner 1995: 97-113). Christian Zionists – like their Jewish counterparts – talk about the ‘unbroken chain of Jewish presence’ in the city, from the earliest times to the rise of Zionism in the late nineteenth century. While Jerusalem was central in the religious imagination, this was never in fact translated into political, social, economical, demographic, cultural and intellectual realities. Indeed, Jerusalem was never a major centre for Judaism during the last 2,000 years. (…)
For some Christian fundamentalist evangelicals, in particular, the ‘Battle for Jerusalem’ is the ‘End of Days Battle of Armageddon’. Apparently in the USA some 60 million evangelical Christians adhere to this apocalyptic eschatology. In the ‘Battle for Jerusalem’, Christian fundamentalists have found common ground with Jewish religious radicals and hard-line Zionists. The fundamentalists share five tenets: (a) belief in the ‘sanctity’ of the modern State of Israel; (b) support for Greater Israel and Zionist territorial expansionism, including Jewish sovereignty over the ‘Whole Land of Israel’; (c) support for exclusive Jewish sovereignty over Greater Jerusalem; (d) the desire for, and indeed the determination to build, the Third Temple on the site of the Muslim shrines at al-Haram al-Sharif; and (e) a general hostility towards Islam – including the claim that Muslims worship a different God from that of Jews and Christians – which is perceived as a common enemy.