Israel Signals Willingness to Compromise on Shrine Detectors
Israel Signals Willingness to Compromise on Shrine Detectors
(Bloomberg) -- Israel signaled a willingness to remove metal detectors at a contested Jerusalem shrine that have touched off deadly confrontations between Israel and the Palestinians and created tensions with the Muslim world.
“We are willing to consider alternatives to metal detectors as long as the solution or alternative guarantees that the next attack doesn’t happen,” the Ynet website quoted Major General Yoav Mordechai, the top military official in the West Bank, as saying. Israel Radio said an inner cabinet of Israeli ministers with security responsibilities would meet on Sunday to discuss the security arrangements at the hilltop compound in Jerusalem’s Old City.
The remarks by a person of Mordechai’s rank -- which the radio station said were originally delivered in interviews with Arabic-language media -- appeared intended to calm the passions that have been ignited by the installation of the devices at the shrine. The compound is home to the Al-Aqsa mosque complex, Islam’s third-holiest shrine, and is venerated by Jews as Temple Mount, the site of their biblical temple.
A week of violence escalated sharply on Friday, when three Palestinian protesters were killed in clashes with Israeli security forces and three Israelis were stabbed to death by a Palestinian attacker who invaded a West Bank settlement home.
Tensions have been seething in Jerusalem, and have spilled over into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, because of conflicting narratives over the metal detectors, which were installed after two Israeli policemen were killed at the site by Israeli Arab gunmen this week.
Israel says they are purely a security precaution, but Muslims opposed to their presence view them as a tightening of Jewish control over the shrine holy to both faiths. Muslims across the world have demanded the devices be removed, and the diplomatic fallout intensified Friday after the Palestinian Authority served notice that it was cutting off all contacts with Israel, at a time when the U.S. administration is trying to restart peace talks.
(A previous version of this story was corrected to show there were multiple Arab gunmen involved in Israeli police killing.)
To contact the reporters on this story: Amy Teibel in Jerusalem at ateibel@bloomberg.net, Fadwa Hodali in Ramallah at fhodali@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alaa Shahine at asalha@bloomberg.net, Kenneth Pringle, Ros Krasny