The past weeks have been marked by a series of terrorist attacks in Jerusalem:
One Israeli man was killed and 14 injured,
some seriously, in Jerusalem on Wednesday, November 5, when a
Palestinian deliberately rammed his commercial van into two separate
crowds of Israelis near a light-rail train station and then attacked
passers-by with a metal pole.
A
nearly identical attack took place exactly two weeks earlier
(Wednesday, October 22) when a Palestinian steered his car into a
light-rail station killing an Israeli-American baby and a woman
originally from Ecuador and injuring eight.
On Wednesday,
October 29, a Palestinian terrorist attacked Yehuda Glick, an
American-born Israeli, as he was departing from a conference in central
Jerusalem. The terrorist shot Rabbi Glick multiple times and he remains
in critical condition.
Rioting on the Temple Mount:
In
the past few months, Palestinian radicals have been trying to breach the
status quo by preventing Christians and Jews from visiting the Temple
Mount. Palestinian rioters - incited by Hamas and the radical branch of
the Islamic Movement in Israel - have attacked visitors as well as the
police with stones and fireworks, using the al-Aqsa Mosque as their base
of operations.
On November 5, several dozen masked Arabs again
rioted on the Temple Mount. As the Mughrabi Gate for non-Muslim visitors
to the Temple Mount opened as usual, the rioters came out of their
prepared positions inside the al-Aqsa mosque and launched stones and
fireworks at police stationed at the gate. The police responded with
non-lethal measures to prevent injuries.
The rioters then
returned to the al-Aqsa mosque, positioning themselves behind barricades
they built the night before. They targeted the police with the hundreds
of fireworks, rocks and iron bars prepared beforehand, all from within
the mosque itself. Several police officers were injured.
Although
as a matter of policy, the police never enter the mosque, following the
escalation of attacks from inside the mosque, the police had to take a
rare step. A small number of officers walked a few steps into the
mosque's entrance, for a short time, to remove the barricades that were
preventing the mosque's doors from being shut. By closing these doors,
the police separated the rioters from their targets, thereby restoring
calm to the Temple Mount and enabling peaceful visits to the plaza.
A
video filmed by the Israel Police clearly shows the Palestinian rioters
at the entrance to the mosque, which they have taken over and
desecrated as a launching base for their attacks.