Police barred non-Muslims from visiting the Al-Aqsa mosque complex on Sunday after right-wing Jewish activists called for a rally at the flashpoint site.
“Police closed the Temple Mount to visitors,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP, using the Jewish term for the plateau in Jerusalem’s walled Old City, believed by many to be the site of the biblical Jewish temple. “The decision was made after leaflets were distributed calling on people to cause disturbances on the Temple Mount,” Rosenfeld said. Local media said a failed contender for leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, hardline settler Moshe Feiglin, had issued leaflets calling on supporters to march there and “purify it from thieving enemies of Israel.”
But Feiglin, who received 23 percent of the vote in a party primary this month, denied planning any disruption at the site, sacred to Muslims and Jews. “This is a standard ascent to the Temple Mount I make once a month on this day, and have been doing so for the past 10 years or so,” he told AFP as he waited with a few dozen of his supporters outside the compound. Denied entry by police they went instead to pray at the adjacent Western Wall, the most sacred site at which Jews can pray. The compound above is home to the third-most sacred site in Islam and is venerated by Jews as the site where King Herod’s temple once stood before it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. Separately, a Palestinian in Gaza died after being injured in a series of retaliatory Israeli air strikes, Gaza medical sources said. The fatality was identified as Abdel Karim Zatuniya, an elderly man serving as a guard at the barracks in the Zeitun area, south-east of Gaza city, who was injured in an air strike late on Saturday night in which four other people were injured. No militant faction in Gaza announced Zatuniya as a member.
Three other Saturday night air strikes—near the Karni crossing east of Gaza city, east of Khan Younis and at an empty house in Rafah—resulted in no further casualties. The Israeli military confirmed launching the strikes, and in a statement early on Sunday said its aircraft “targeted a terror tunnel and a weapon manufacturing facility in the northern Gaza Strip, a terror tunnel in the central Gaza Strip and an additional terror tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip,” noting direct hits. “These sites were targeted in response to the rocket fire on communities in southern Israel,” the statement read, noting that a Friday night rocket from Gaza that struck between two houses in the Hof Ashkelon area had lightly injured an Israeli woman.
