The Palestinian African Neighborhood Near Al-Aqsa Mosque About to Collapse Due to Continuous Israeli Excavations 

African community suburb near Aqsa about to collapse

[ 26/01/2010 - 09:37 AM ]

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)--

Inhabitants in the African community suburb adjacent to the Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem have said they could not sleep because of the excavations under their homes round the clock.

Hosni Shahin, one of the inhabitants, told the PIC on Monday that the sound of digging has been going on for the past two years and that the community had repeatedly warned of such diggings.

He said that the sound of digging increased at the start of this year, apparently, he added, the Israelis were using bigger digging tools.

Shahin feared that the 20 houses in the suburb might crumble as a result and that 150 people inhabiting them would be rendered homeless.

He said that Jewish settlement societies would then seize control of the area and build a settlement outpost on its ruins.

Excavations blamed for latest Silwan collapse

Jerusalem – Ma’an – The Wadi Hilwah Information Centre reported another collapse in the Silwan neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem on Monday, south of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City, creating a 12 meter square hole in the middle of Wadi Hilwah street.

Jawad Siam, head of the information centre, said that the latest collapse in Wadi Hilwah took place over a 10 meter deep tunnel and is a few meters from the previous cave in at the beginning of January, as a result of Israeli excavations in the area.

A child was injured and a vehicle fell ithrough the site, Siam said, adding that the local Al-Ein mosque, where Israeli excavation has intensified, was flooded as rainwater seeped into the collapsed site.

The Al-Quds Centre for Economic and Social rights said that this incident follows a number of similar collapses in Silwan recently, pointing out that last year, a collapse occurred in a girls’ school, injuring 17 students.

On 2 January 2010 The Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage reported another street collapse on the main road of Silwan.

"The collapse created a hole, two meters long and one and a half meters deep," according to a statement from the foundation, which oversees the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

According to the foundation, the collapse was related to ongoing excavations by Israeli authorities in the vicinity, apparently on tunnels extending underneath the neighborhood about 700 meters from the mosque compound. Authorities recently removed quantities of dirt and rocks from under Silwan to undisclosed locations, the statement said.
Source: http://www.maannews.net/

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Sheikh Tamimi warns of Al-Aqsa mosque collapsing

Jerusalem – Ma’an – Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, chief Islamic judge for the Palestinian Authority, warned that the Al-Aqsa Mosque suffers from cracks and fissures in the walls, a sign of its impending collapse, as a result of Israeli excavations below it, he said on Monday.

Sheikh Tamimi further warned that houses in the surround neighborhood are at risk resulting from the Israeli Antiquities Authority working a night and removing dozens of bags with stones from the excavation site south of the mosque.

He further spoke of the rise in extremist Jewish, as well as military intrusion into the compound, including the entry of 50 students from various departments of archeology in Israeli universities to undertake research and of settlers while women prayed, he said.

The Sheikh held the Israeli government responsible for the collapses and deterioration around the Al-Aqsa Mosque and its surrounding environs and cautioned that Islamic and Christian sites are in jeopardy.

Sheikh Tamimi further called on Arabs and Muslims throughout the world to assist in halting the on-going Israeli excavations near the holy site.

His comments follow the another collapse in the Silwan neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem on Monday, creating a 12 meter square hole in the middle of Wadi Hilwah street.

Source: http://www.maannews.net/eng/

Double Joy: Prayer at Temple Mount Before Daughter Weds
11 January 10 by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

(Israelnationalnews.com) Temple Mount activist Yehuda Glick won a seven-month battle on Sunday and prayed at the holy site with his 19-year-old daughter, just hours before she married in a ceremony in Bnei Brak. He told Israel National News they prayed at the site and were escorted by two policemen and another guard.

“According to the law, you can pray on the Temple Mount, but cannot ‘demonstrate’ by moving the body in a fashion that indicates praying or by holding a prayer book,” he explained. “I can stand and move my lips. They are not going to read my lips to know what I am saying.”

Nevertheless, one of the policemen filmed him and his daughter for 20 minutes. Glick revealed that he prayed for the safe release of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit and American prisoner-for-life Jonathan Pollard. “I also praised the A-lmighty and prayed that all Jews visit the Temple Mount," he added.

Glick, former head of the Temple Mount Institute that has re-created many of the holy items used in ancient sacrifices. Glick said that police consider Jews strangers on the Temple Mount, but that if more Jews visit, the situation will change.

Police had prevented him from visiting the holy site based on allegations that his appearance would provoke violence among Muslims. Glick maintains that Arabs "know me and have a good relationship with me. I wish the police would have the same relationship, but they do not like me.” There were no disturbances during the visit by Glick and his daughter.

The High Court previously accepted Glick’s petition charging police with discrimination, and the justices ordered that he be allowed to visit the Temple Mount. Police refused to honor the order, however, and he filed two more petitions with the court. Finally, two weeks ago, the court set December 26 as a final date for police cooperation.

After several meetings between the police and Glick, he finally was allowed to visit late Thursday, when it was too late to make the necessary Halakhic (Jewish ritual) preparations. Jews are prohibited from the Temple Mount on Friday, the Muslim holy day of the week, and the next possible date was Sunday, the eve of his daughter’s marriage.

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Here are some quotes from the Temple Mount Institute's website:

"The Temple Institute is dedicated to every aspect of the Holy Temple of Jerusalem, and the central role it fulfilled, and will once again fulfill, in the spiritual wellbeing of both Israel and all the nations of the world."

"The Institute is dedicated to every aspect of the Biblical commandment to build the Holy Temple of G-d on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. Our short-term goal is to rekindle the flame of the Holy Temple in the hearts of mankind through education. Our long-term goal is to do all in our limited power to bring about the building of the Holy Temple in our time."

"The major focus of the Institute is its efforts towards the beginning of the actual rebuilding of the Holy Temple. Towards this end, the Institute has begun to restore and construct the sacred vessels for the service of the Holy Temple. These vessels, which G-d commanded Israel to create, can be seen today at our headquarters in Jerusalem."

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This institute among others are planning to rebuild the Third Temple. The attacks on Al Aqsa are intensifying.

According to Sheikh Taysir Tamimi present Israeli provocations in Jerusalem are aimed primarily at partitioning Al-Aqsa esplanade. "They want to take over Al-Aqsa Mosque step by step as they did with the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron following the massacre of 1994." There Israeli occupation authorities partitioned the mosque between Jews and Muslims, giving Jews the lion's share of the ancient structure where the patriarch Ibrahim is believed to be buried.

An invention called 'the Jewish people' 
By Tom Segev - Haaretz.com

Israel's Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland. Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE. The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia of exile. Wrong, says the historian Shlomo Zand, in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened - hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts.

According to Zand, the Romans did not generally exile whole nations, and most of the Jews were permitted to remain in the country. The number of those exiled was at most tens of thousands. When the country was conquered by the Arabs, many of the Jews converted to Islam and were assimilated among the conquerors. It follows that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews. Zand did not invent this thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others.

If the majority of the Jews were not exiled, how is it that so many of them reached almost every country on earth? Zand says they emigrated of their own volition or, if they were among those exiled to Babylon, remained there because they chose to. Contrary to conventional belief, the Jewish religion tried to induce members of other faiths to become Jews, which explains how there came to be millions of Jews in the world. As the Book of Esther, for example, notes, "And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them."

Zand quotes from many existing studies, some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse. He also describes at length the Jewish kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Jewish Berbers in North Africa. The community of Jews in Spain sprang from Arabs who became Jews and arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the Christians, and from European-born individuals who had also become Jews.

The first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) did not come from the Land of Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Zand explains the origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East, some of them as merchants.

We find, then, that the members of a variety of peoples and races, blond and black, brown and yellow, became Jews in large numbers. According to Zand, the Zionist need to devise for them a shared ethnicity and historical continuity produced a long series of inventions and fictions, along with an invocation of racist theses. Some were concocted in the minds of those who conceived the Zionist movement, while others were offered as the findings of genetic studies conducted in Israel.

Prof. Zand teaches at Tel Aviv University. His book, "When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?" (published by Resling in Hebrew), is intended to promote the idea that Israel should be a "state of all its citizens" - Jews, Arabs and others - in contrast to its declared identity as a "Jewish and democratic" state. Personal stories, a prolonged theoretical discussion and abundant sarcastic quips do not help the book, but its historical chapters are well-written and cite numerous facts and insights that many Israelis will be astonished to read for the first time.

JEWISH EXCAVATIONS TRIGGER LANDSLIDE IN JERUSALEM

GAZA, Jan 3 (NNN-KUNA): The ongoing Israeli excavations have led to a landslide in a main street in Salwan district, downtown Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa Waqf and Heritage Foundation announced Saturday evening.

“The landslide, which is two meters long, one meter wide and one and a half meters deep, took place some 700 meters to the south of Al-Aqsa Mosque – the Muslims’ third holiest site,” said a statement issued by the foundation.

In an earlier statement the foundation cautioned that the network of tunnels, being dug by the Israeli authorities around and under Al-Aqsa Mosque under the pretext of archeological excavations, could topple the Mosque and the nearby homes.

“These activities have rendered most of the buildings in Salwan area unsafe and liable to collapse at any moment.

“They are part of the designs of the Israeli occupation authorities to force the local Palestinians to leave their homes for Jewish settlers as a prelude to judaizing the holy city,” according to the statement.

The foundation appealed to the Arab and Muslim nations to step in immediately to save the endangered Mosque.

-NNN-KUNA

Israeli excavations blamed for latest Silwan collapse
Yesterday (Last Update) Time 22:49

Jerusalem – Ma'an – The Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage reported another street collapse on the main road in the area of Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem on Saturday.

"The collapse created a hole, two meters long and one and a half meters deep," according to a statement from the foundation, which oversees the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

According to the foundation, the collapse was related to ongoing excavations by Israeli authorities in the vicinity, apparently on tunnels extending underneath the neighborhood about 700 meters from the mosque compound. Authorities recently removed quantities of dirt and rocks from under Silwan to undisclosed locations, the statement said.
Source: http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=251495

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WAKE UP MUSLIMS!

Al Aqsa is in real immediate danger!

"Israeli excavations and continuing digging right beneath the Haram al Sharif’s esplanade have already caused irreparable damage to the stability of Al-Aqsa Mosque’s foundations." Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement

"I have no doubt that the Aqsa foundations have been greatly weakened due to these tunnels and other excavations," continues Sheikh Salah. "You don’t have to be a great architect to realize this. We have already seen holes and cracks all over the area."

Sheikh Salah says he is completely certain Israel wants to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque.

"They want to do it in a way that would appear as is happening as a result of natural causes, such an earthquake."

Salah says that Israel has a "diabolical plan" and is acting on it while Muslims are still just watching and contenting themselves with verbal protestations.