Dozens of Palestinians have been injured in clashes with Israeli police as a confrontation over one of Jerusalem’s holiest sites enters its sixth day.
The Red Crescent said that it had treated almost 50 people for minor injuries outside the Al-Aqsa mosque — a site revered by Jews as the Temple Mount — last night. Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian politician, was hit with a rubber bullet. One man suffered a serious head wound.
More violence is expected today after several Palestinian groups, including Fatah, the secular movement that governs the occupied West Bank, called for a “day of rage”.
Tensions in Jerusalem are at their highest in years. The latest unrest began on Friday when three gunmen shot and killed two Israeli police officers stationed at one of the entrances to the mosque. Police closed the complex for two days, and officers who searched it over the weekend said that they found a cache of weapons and ammunition, including a sub-machinegun.
Israel, seeking to prevent further attacks, installed metal detectors at the gates and reopened the mosque on Sunday, but officials from Waqf, the Muslim authority that oversees the site, refused to pass through the machines. Instead, they held prayers in the streets outside, which led to Monday’s clashes.
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Palestinians fear that any changes at the complex are meant to limit their access, despite repeated assurances from Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, that he does not wish to change the status quo.
Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war with its Arab neighbours but it allows Jordan to act as the custodian of the mosque.
The complex, in East Jerusalem’s walled old city, has long been a flashpoint. Clashes there in 2015 led to months of deadly random attacks on Israeli civilians, most by lone Palestinians. Yesterday two Israeli soldiers were rammed with a car near Hebron, in the West Bank. The Palestinian driver was shot dead, officials said.