Who owns temple mount

Since Israel captured the Old City in the war, it has allowed the Waqf to continue to administer the Temple Mount, and restricted Jews to visits there without prayer. In Streetwise Hebrew for the Times of Israel Community, each month we learn several colloquial Hebrew phrases around a common theme. These are bite-size audio Hebrew classes that we think you'll really enjoy.

This month, we're learning phrases on the topic of strength and power. Ready to get tough with us? The religious sensitivities surrounding the Temple Mount have repeatedly made the site a flashpoint for violence and unrest.

Palestinians have long suspected that Israel intends to alter the status quo established for the site following the war, and some Palestinian leaders have even claimed that the Jewish temple never stood there. In September , then opposition leader Ariel Sharon undertook a visit to the site under heavy guard, sparking riots that would eventually blossom into the Second Intifada.

Tensions are frequently elevated during Yom Yerushalayim Jerusalem Day on which Jews celebrate the recapture of the Western Wall and during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. Efforts to secure Jewish prayer rights at the Temple Mount have gained traction in recent years, despite the mainstream rabbinic opinion that Jews should not set foot there. A number of rabbis have issued contrary rulings, saying that visitation and prayer should be permitted, and by some estimates the number of Jewish visitors has vastly increased.

Among the most prominent activists is Yehuda Glick , an American-born rabbi and current member of the Israeli Knesset. Glick is a leading figure in efforts to secure Jewish prayer rights on the mount, framing his campaign in the language of civil rights. In , he survived an assassination attempt by a suspected member of Islamic Jihad. Israel History. We use cookies to improve your experience on our site and bring you ads that might interest you.

Aerial view of the Temple Mount. Why is the Temple Mount holy to Muslims? Three years later, the Waqf, with the approval of the Israeli government, announced plans to create an emergency exit for the El-Marwani Mosque. But Israeli officials later accused the Waqf of exceeding its self-stated mandate. Instead of a small emergency exit, the Waqf excavated two arches, creating a massive vaulted entranceway. In doing so, bulldozers dug a pit more than feet long and nearly 40 feet deep.

Trucks carted away hundreds of tons of soil and debris. Israeli archaeologists and scholars raised an outcry. Some said the Waqf was deliberately trying to obliterate evidence of Jewish history. Others laid the act to negligence on a monstrous scale. But he told the Jerusalem Post that archaeological colleagues had examined the excavated material and had found nothing of significance.

And he bristled at the suggestion the Waqf sought to destroy Jewish history. Zachi Zweig was a third-year archaeology student at Bar- Ilan University, near Tel Aviv, when he heard news reports about dump trucks transporting Temple Mount soil to the Kidron Valley.

With the help of a fellow student he rounded up 15 volunteers to visit the dump site, where they began surveying and collecting samples.

A week later, Zweig presented his findings—including pottery fragments and ceramic tiles—to archaeologists attending a conference at the university. By that point though, Zweig says, his cause had attracted the attention of the media and of his favorite lecturer at Bar-Ilan—the archaeologist Gaby Barkay.

Zweig urged Barkay to do something about the artifacts. In , Barkay got permission to search the soil dumped in the Kidron Valley. He and Zweig hired trucks to cart it from there to Emek Tzurim National Park at the foot of Mount Scopus, collected donations to support the project and recruited people to undertake the sifting.

The Temple Mount Sifting Project, as it is sometimes called, marks the first time archaeologists have systematically studied material removed from beneath the sacred compound. Barkay, ten full-time staffers and a corps of part-time volunteers have uncovered a wealth of artifacts, ranging from three scarabs either Egyptian or inspired by Egyptian design , from the second millennium B. A bronze coin dating to the Great Revolt against the Romans A.

Barkay says some discoveries provide tangible evidence of biblical accounts. Fragments of terra-cotta figurines, from between the eighth and sixth centuries B. Other finds challenge long-held beliefs. For example, it is widely accepted that early Christians used the Mount as a garbage dump on the ruins of the Jewish temples.

Barkay and his colleagues have published their main findings in two academic journals in Hebrew, and they plan to eventually publish a book-length account in English. To be sure, the Mount is a flash point in the Middle East conflict. While Israelis saw this as the reunification of their ancient capital, Palestinians still deem East Jerusalem to be occupied Arab land a position also held by the United Nations.

The Temple Mount is precariously balanced between these opposing views. Although Israel claims political sovereignty over the compound, custodianship remains with the Waqf. As such, Israelis and Palestinians cautiously eye each other for any tilt in the status quo. At its core, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents rival claims to the same territory—and both sides rely on history to make the case for whose roots in the land run deepest.

For the Israelis, that history begins 3, years ago, when the Temple Mount—believed by many biblical scholars to be the mountain in the region of Moriah mentioned in the Book of Genesis—was an irregularly shaped mound rising some 2, feet among the stark Judean Hills. The summit loomed above a small settlement called Jebus, which clung to a ridge surrounded by ravines. The Old Testament describes how an army led by David, the second king of ancient Israel, breached the walls of Jebus around B.

David then built a palace nearby and created his capital, Jerusalem. At the site of a threshing floor atop the mountain, where farmers had separated grains from chaff, David constructed a sacrificial altar. Scholars, however, have pieced together a tentative portrait of the Beit Hamikdash from descriptions in the Bible and architectural remains of sanctuaries elsewhere in the region built during the same era.