According to the first assessments this Friday, there would be twenty wounded among the Palestinian demonstrators and three among the Israeli police.
Clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli police on the esplanade of the Mosques in Jerusalem, the first since the start of Ramadan, left around twenty injured on Friday amid fears of a conflagration in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In a first report to AFP, the Palestinian Red Crescent had reported seven injured in these morning clashes in the old city of East Jerusalem, a Palestinian sector occupied since 1967 by Israel, before quickly reviewing this toll upwards. .
According to an AFP photographer on the spot, the clashes were fed and more than a hundred Palestinians threw projectiles in the direction of the Israeli security forces, who responded by firing rubber bullets at Palestinian demonstrators.
Easter weekend under high tension
“Twenty injured people have so far been transferred to hospitals in Jerusalem in connection with the ongoing clashes [à l’esplanade des Mosquées]. And there are still injured people on the site., said the Palestinian Red Crescent. For its part, the Israeli police said that three policemen were injured.
Around 4 a.m., “dozens of young masked rioters”some displaying themselves with flags of the armed Islamist movement Hamas, started a processionon the esplanade of the Mosques, and threw stones in the direction of the adjacent Wailing Wall, the most important place of prayer in Jewish tradition, said the Israeli police saying they intervened to “restore order”.
The Easter weekend will see the crossroads, in a Jerusalem under high tension, of the faithful of the three religions. In the old city, the Stations of the Cross have been brought forward an hour to prevent Christians from crossing paths with Muslims going to the al-Aqsa mosque. As for the Jews, they do not go through the same path and should remain confined to the Wailing Wall.
But according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, a religious Zionist organization, Hozrim LaHar, does not intend to stop there. These followers of the reconstruction of the Third Jewish Temple on the esplanade of the Mosques offer a reward to its members who go up to this holy place of Islam, forbidden to the faithful of other religions outside visiting hours. If they have little chance of succeeding, the simple threat worries the Muslims who risk arriving en masse to protect al-Aqsa, leading to potential police interventions. This is how last year’s escalation began.
During Ramadan in 2021, the holy month of Muslims, nocturnal demonstrations in Jerusalem and clashes even on the esplanade had turned into eleven days of war between the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, and Israel .