Over 20 wounded in new Jerusalem violence around Al Aqsa Mosque compound

More than 20 Palestinians and Israelis were wounded on Sunday in several incidents in and around Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, two days after major violence at the site.

The latest clashes take the number of wounded since Friday to more than 170, at a tense time when the Jewish Passover festival coincides with the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

They also follow deadly violence in Israel and the occupied West Bank starting in late March, in which 36 people have been killed.

Early on Sunday morning, police said “hundreds” of Palestinian demonstrators inside the mosque compound started gathering piles of stones, shortly before the arrival of Jewish visitors.

Jews are allowed to visit but not to pray at the site, also known as Temple Mount, the holiest place in Judaism and third-holiest in Islam.

Israeli police said its forces had entered the compound in order to “remove” the demonstrators and “re-establish order”.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said 19 Palestinians were wounded, including at least five who were hospitalised. It said some had been wounded with rubber-coated steel bullets.

An AFP team near the entrance to the compound early Sunday morning saw Jewish worshippers leaving the site, barefoot for religious reasons, and protected by heavily armed police.

Outside the Old City, which lies in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, Palestinian youths threw rocks at passing buses, resulting in seven people being treated for light wounds, Shaare Zedek hospital said.

Video released by the police showed two Israeli buses, their windows smashed as young men showered them with rocks.

The police said they had arrested 18 Palestinians, and Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev said Israel would “act strongly against anyone who dares to use terrorism against Israeli citizens.”

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said that the security forces “continue to receive a free hand... for any action that will provide security to the citizens of Israel”, while stressing every effort should be made to allow members of all religions to worship in Jerusalem.

Senior Palestinian official Hussein Al Sheikh said Sunday that “Israel’s dangerous escalation in the Al-Aqsa compound ... is a blatant attack on our holy places”, and called on the international community to intervene.

King Abdullah II of Jordan — the kingdom serves as custodian of holy places in east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in 1967 and later annexed in a move not recognised by most of the international community — on Sunday called on Israel to “stop all illegal and provocative measures” that drives “further aggravation”.

But the chief of the Hamas Islamist movement, which controls the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, had earlier warned Israel that “Al-Aqsa is ours and ours alone”.

“Our people have the right to access it and pray in it, and we will not bow down to (Israeli) repression and terror,” Ismail Haniyeh said in a statement.

The United Nations has called for calm, a year after clashes in and around the mosque compound escalated into an 11-day war between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza.