Violence builds up in Jerusalem amid dangerous political vacuum

The local clashes, which have been accumulating in East Jerusalem for a month, affected Friday, May 7 in the heart of the city, in Al-Aqsa, and changed their nature. In the evening, Israeli law enforcement violently dispersed Palestinians on the Mosque Plaza, injuring more than 175, while six Israeli policemen required treatment.

The Palestinian Red Crescent has set up a field hospital at the site to treat injuries to the face and eyes from metal bullets encircled in rubber and shrapnel from stun grenades fired by police and gendarmes. Later that evening, worshipers stood in the compound of Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the vapor of grenades – one of them, or a heavy shard, went to finish its run on a carpet inside.

Meanwhile, the mosque’s loudspeakers called on the younger ones to restrain, and the police to leave. Jordan, guardian of Muslim holy sites in East Jerusalem, denounced a “Savage aggression” from the security forces. Such scenes, whose images are broadcast in real time, the Israeli security forces should have sought to avoid them by all means, on the eve of the “night of fate”, an important gathering at the end of the month of ramadan, saturday. And three days before the usual parades of Jewish settlers in the Old City, Monday, the anniversary of the Palestinian conquest of Jerusalem in 1967 and its annexation by Israel.

Several families threatened with eviction

Rally to protest the eviction of Palestinian families from land claimed by Jewish settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem on May 7.

For the last great prayer of Friday of the holy month, tens of thousands of faithful gathered on the esplanade during the day. Then several thousand remained there to protest against the threat of eviction, by the Israeli justice system, of several families from the neighboring district of Sheikh Jarrah, for the benefit of Jewish settlers. This affair has poisoned the air of East Jerusalem for a week, and resonates far in the Palestinian territories.

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After the evening prayers, Israeli police said they responded to the throwing of stones, bottles and other objects from hundreds of rioters on the plaza. It was then that the day escalated, with the most significant violence around the holy sites since 2018 – the latest following the announcement of the move of the American embassy to Jerusalem.

On this Shabbat evening, the Israeli authorities did not produce an official statement, apart from a police inventory. This silence is symptomatic. In Jerusalem for a month, local violence has fueled each other against a backdrop of political vacuum. The government of Benyamin Netanyahu, paralyzed after four legislative elections in two years (the last in March), is no more than a transitional organ on borrowed time, which meets very little, with many empty chairs, and which depends on increasingly vocal far-right allies.

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