stones, tear gas, rubber bullets. New clashes pitted loyal Palestinians and Israeli police on the Mosques esplanade in East Jerusalem on Monday, leaving more than 300 injured, mostly Palestinians, after a weekend of violence in the Holy City.
Faced with the escalation, a meeting of the UN Security Council is scheduled later in the day, at the request of Tunisia, on the situation in East Jerusalem, a Palestinian sector occupied by Israel for more than fifty years.
As international calls for calm multiply, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the “firmness” of the security forces to guarantee “stability” in Jerusalem. “We support them in this just struggle. ”
Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority denounced a “barbaric aggression” by Israeli forces and the leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, warned that the Palestinian “resistance” will not “stand idly by”.
More than 305 Palestinians injured, says Palestinian Red Crescent
At the beginning of the afternoon, the clashes ended on the esplanade, Islam’s third holiest site in the old city and whose access was limited during the day to the faithful aged 40 and over. But the situation remains tense.
Early in the morning, hundreds of Palestinians threw projectiles at Israeli forces positioned inside the Mosque Plaza, a journalist from Agence France-Presse noted. The police responded by firing rubber bullets and tear gas.
According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, more than 305 Palestinians have been injured, including more than 200 evacuated in ambulances screaming sirens to hospitals. Dr Adnane Farhoud, director general of Maqassed hospital, reported numerous injuries to the face and eyes from rubber bullets.
Resumption of violence coincided with “Jerusalem Day”
“We fear that something serious is happening today,” Dr. Farhoud told Agence France-Presse, while seven patients are in critical condition according to the Red Crescent.
Israeli police, who guard the entrances to the plaza, called the Temple Mount by Jews, have reported at least nine wounded in their ranks. She warned that she would “not allow extremists to threaten the safety of the public.”
The resumption of violence coincided with “Jerusalem Day”, marking according to the Hebrew calendar the conquest of East Jerusalem by the Hebrew state and often punctuated by clashes between Palestinians and Israelis.
The most violent clashes since 2017 on the Esplanade des Mosques
Israel has proclaimed the whole of Jerusalem its “eternal and indivisible” capital, while the Palestinians aspire to make the eastern sector the capital of the state they aspire to. The question of Jerusalem is one of the main stumbling blocks in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, which have stalled for several years.
Friday evening, more than 200 people, mostly Palestinians but also Israeli police officers, were injured in the most violent clashes since 2017 on the Mosques esplanade, a place of high tensions.
Saturday and Sunday calm returned to the plaza, but clashes continued between Palestinians and Israeli police in other areas of East Jerusalem, leaving more than a hundred injured, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.
One of the vectors of tension in recent weeks in East Jerusalem has been the fate of Palestinian families in the Sheikh-Jarrah neighborhood threatened with eviction in favor of Jewish settlers. An Israeli Supreme Court hearing in the case scheduled for Monday has been postponed indefinitely.
On the Gaza side
In the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian enclave controlled by Hamas, incendiary balloons and rockets were launched during the night towards the south of the bordering Israeli territory, in support of the demonstrators in Jerusalem.
Two of the seven rockets were intercepted by the anti-missile system and three fell in vacant lots, according to the army. In retaliation, the army fired “against military posts” of Hamas in Gaza and closed the Erez crossing, the only one allowing the people of Gaza to exit into Israel.
Fearing the escalation, as early as Friday, the United States called on Israelis and Palestinians to “end the violence” and expressed concern over “the potential expulsion of Palestinian families from Sheikh-Jarrah”.
Call for calm
The European Union as well as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, four Arab countries that have normalized their relations with Israel in recent months, have called for calm and restraint.
Turkey called on “the world to act to end this unending Israeli aggression against unarmed civilians in their own land.”
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