LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Temple Mount: Moslem Waqf
built 615 days ago
The Waqf's construction works on the Temple Mount continued uninterrupted over the weekend. The Jerusalem Municipality has begun legal proceedings against the works, and sought a court order today to block them. If the Moslem Waqf does not halt its activities there within a week, the city will ask for police intervention. The Moslems have recently opened a 12-meter wide opening in the Solomon's Stables area under the southern area of the Temple Mount, and great damage to Jewish archeological artifacts there is feared.
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The recent renewal of Jewish entry onto the Temple Mount fueled a wave of anti-Israeli incitement spearheaded by Arafat, who last week convened a meeting with leaders of the Waqf, the Islamic entity that manages Jerusalem's holy Muslim sites. He sent letters to Arab leaders threatening that there would be "grave consequences" if the "invasion of extremists disguised as tourists, under the auspices of the Israeli police," continued. Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen called the tours "provocative" and Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said the Christian and Jewish visits were "an insult to Muslims everywhere."
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During the ten-year “reign” of Arafat on the Temple Mount, and in the years since his death, numerous unauthorized and archaeologically unsupervised construction projects have been carried out. In 1996 the Waqf began converting the underground area of the Mount popularly known as Solomon’s Stables into a large mosque. It has bulldozed parts of the top of the mount to make way for “open” mosques, cleaned ancient cisterns, paved over ancient areas, damaged an ancient wall, dug a trench for a utility line, and removed thousands of tons of “debris,” from the site, dumping it in the Kidron valley.3 They’ve ... employed a huge electric saw to cut up ancient stones from the Temple Mount, destroying any historical evidence the stones may have offered. An analysis in the early 1990s found that the Waqf had committed more than 35 violations of Israeli antiquities law on the site.4
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Moslem Waqf workers on the Temple Mount began to fashion concrete frames for the underground openings that they illegally made over the past weeks. They have ... poured concrete for a supporting wall on the eastern side of the Temple Mount. The Chai Vekayam movement, whose petition against the works is still pending, claims that chances for orderly archaeological excavations at the site are becoming slimmer.
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The Temple Mount, as the site is called today, is Judaism's holiest site. For centuries a place where Jews were forbidden to enter. The site today is under the administration of the Jerusalem Waqf (Islamic Religious Authority). Jews have been allowed to enter the Mount as of the summer of 2003 under the watchful eye of Waqf officials and the Jerusalem police who stringently guard the status quo regarding the presence of Jews on the Temple Mount.
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The Waqf, the religious Muslim endowment that rules the Temple Mount, decided to banish archaeological supervision after the 'Tunnel Riots' in September 1996, during the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. These riots were about the opening of a tunnel along the Temple Complex' Western Wall, to Muslim Quarter. During the fierce fight around 70 Palestinians were killed and 17 Israeli soldiers.
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