TENS of thousands of Palestinians performed Friday prayer at Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem yesterday, pressing through Israeli checkpoints and metal barriers thrown up at the city’s entrances and on the roads leading to the compound.
The Islamic Waqf Department confirmed the scale of the turnout despite restrictions on worshippers arriving from across the occupied territories.
Israeli police stopped dozens of young men at checkpoints around the city and the Old City and turned them back.
The crowds answered calls from Jerusalem-based and national groups for Palestinians in the city and inside Israel to fill the mosque’s courtyards, arrive early and stay on after prayer.
The groups framed the presence as ribat, a steadfast guard over the site.
They set it against settler incursions, attempts to perform rituals in the compound and plans to impose a temporal and spatial division of Aqsa.
On Thursday Sheikh Ra’ed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement, urged residents of the Galilee, the Triangle, the Naqab and the coastal cities to travel to the mosque, saying it ‘will remain unchanged until the Day of Judgment’.
Across the West Bank, farmers went into their groves for the olive harvest under a wave of settler attacks.
In Birin, in the al-Khalil governorate, settlers from the Adorin outpost, built on village land in Khallat al-Furn, set dogs on harvesters.
A 79-year-old woman was bitten on the thigh and taken to hospital by ambulance, village council head Farid Burqan said.
Settlers cut down around 100 olive trees belonging to Jamal Amin Abu Mweis in al-Mughayyir, east of Jenin, on Thursday night.
They also set fire to olive trees in the Wadi al-Shaer area near Salfit.
East of Ramallah, in Yabroud, settlers boxed in a Palestinian man’s car on the main road, beat him and his child and drove off with the vehicle.
In Deir Ibzi, settlers drove farmers and international solidarity volunteers off the land they were harvesting. Near Birzeit, Israeli soldiers expelled farmers and Rabbis for Human Rights activists from privately owned land.
One soldier was filmed telling them: ‘Jews have a prior right over Arabs to everything in this country. This is a Jewish state.’
