Excavations deepen Israeli-Palestinian divide - 16 Apr 09

Excavations deepen Israeli-Palestinian divide - 16 Apr 09:

"Israeli authorities are digging tunnels under East Jerusalem, as part of its takeover of Palestinian neighbourhoods.

Palestinians fear that the very foundations of their lives could be under threat from the tunnels that cut close to the heart of what Muslims call the Haram al-Shareef, known as the Temple Mount to Jews and sacred to both.

Al Jazeera's Clayton Swisher reports."



Palestine Video - A Palestine Vlog

False flag Cover Up by IDF

False flag Cover Up by IDF:

"The Israeli Defense force (IDF) released a video claiming to show evidence that Hamas had used a mosque to store weapons, but an analysis of the video casts doubt on the claim. The IDF also falsely claimed Hamas had fired mortars from a UN-run school to cover up its shelling of the school, resulting in the deaths of more than 40 civilians who had taken refuge there. This was the third UN school hit. Israel has also attacked a UN medical center, UN convoys bringing humanitarian supplies into Gaza, and a UN warehouse where such goods are stored."



Palestine Video - A Palestine Vlog

Mosques not spared in Gaza war - 23 Jan 09

Mosques not spared in Gaza war - 23 Jan 09:

"Gazans have started the massive task of rebuilding, after Israel's three-week war on the strip.

Even its 24 mosques weren't spared.

But for the first time since the offensive ended, Muslims will be able to hold Friday prayers.

Zeina Awad reports from Gaza City."



Palestine Video - A Palestine Vlog

Praying in defiance of Israel's war in Gaza - 09 Jan 09

Praying in defiance of Israel's war in Gaza - 09 Jan 09: "More than a dozen mosques have been hit in the course of Israel's war on Gaza.

But two weeks into the war, Muslim worshippers have not been deterred by the destruction, or the risks of going to pray at what could be a potential target.

Ayman Mohyeldin has this report from Gaza."



Palestine Video - A Palestine Vlog

Israel attack hits Gaza Mosque

Israel attack hits Gaza Mosque:

"At least 11 Palestinians, including one child, have been killed after Israeli forces struck a mosque during prayers in the town of Beit Lahiya, north of Jabaliya in the Gaza Strip.

More than 200 people were inside the the Ibrahim al-Maqadna mosque praying when it was struck.

It is not clear yet whether the mosque was hit as part of the Israeli army's shelling, which started on Saturday afternoon.

At least 50 people were wounded, Hamas and medical officials said.

The Israeli military has destroyed several mosques during its week-long offensive in Gaza, saying Hamas uses the houses of worship to store weapons.

Ayman Mohyeldin, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Gaza, said: 'As much as Israel wants to be surgical in its strikes at the end of the day it is civilians that are being hit. This is proof that civilians are caught up in these attacks.'

Mohyeldin said doctors in the Gaza Strip were being overwhelmed by the number of casualties being brought in as a result of the Israeli offensive and that hospitals were near a state of collapse due to a lack of medicines and blood."



Palestine Video - A Palestine Vlog

Mosaic News - Gazans Turn to Wood Fire, Settlers Attack Mosques in Hebron - 11/26/08

Mosaic News - 11/26/08: World News from the Middle East:

"Headlines:
-Night of Horror in Mumbai, India 0:00
-Kuwait Ruler Wants MPs, Cabinet to Resolve Crisis 8:10
-Iraq Struggles to Cope With Landmine Victims 10:35
-Gazans Turn to Wood Fire 13:45
-Settlers Attack Mosques in Hebron 17:10
-Jordanian Families Visit Loved Ones in Israeli Jails 20:50
-Bush Talking Turkey Again 24:35
Produced for Link TV by Jamal Dajani."



Palestine Video - A Palestine Vlog

Mosque and Muslim cemeteries Vandalised in Hebron

Mosque and Muslim cemeteries Vandalised in Hebron: "http://www.euronews.net Mosque and Muslim cemeteries Vandalised by Jewish settlers in Hebron"

Related News Item:
Settlers in Hebron write graffiti on mosque walls insulting Islam, calling for killing Arabs
Source: IMEMC
Saturday November 22, 2008 20:52

A group of extremist Israeli settlers wrote graffiti on the walls on the Al Ras Mosque, in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, calling for killing all Arabs and insulting Islam and Prophet Mohammad. The settlers also dumped trash into the mosque and uprooted dozens of olive trees.

The recent attack was carried out as the settlers “were expressing” their rejection to evacuation a Palestinian house adjacent to the mosque. The settlers illegally occupied the property on March 19 and the Israeli Supreme Court recently decided that they should evacuate it. The house in question belongs to Al Rajabi family.

Local sources in Hebron reported that the settlers also desecrated graves in the Islamic Graveyard and hurled stones at dozens of Palestinian vehicles and homes in the city.

Most of the attacks were concentrated in Al Ja’bary neighborhood, Wadi Al Nasarah, Wadi Al Hasseen, and Jabal Jalis.

Several residents in Hebron complained that they became imprisoned in their homes, cannot leave them as they will be subjected to assaults and abuse by the settlers.

Hebron governor Dr. Hussein Al A’raj demanded the Israeli occupation forces to implement the Israeli court’s ruling and evacuate the settlers from the house of Al Rajabi.

“This is unimaginable; the settlers are desecrating the graves, writing graffiti insulting the prophet and insulting Islam”, the governor stated, “the high court issued several rulings to evacuate the house, to reopen roads the army and the settlers closed, but the army does not care and continues to protect the settlers who are attacking us, our graves, our homes, holy sites and lands”.

The settlers yet continue to ignore the decision of the Supreme Court as it stated in its last week’s ruling that they should voluntarily evacuate the four-story house within days.

A statement issued by the office of the Israeli Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Vilnai, said that the court ordered the evacuation of the settlers from the Palestinian house but the settlers ignored the ruling.

Consecutive Israeli governments traditionally avoid taking action against the radical and armed Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. This issue enabled the settlers to keep and even expand dozens of illegal settlement outposts.




Palestine Video - A Palestine Vlog

Israel replaces mosques with synagogues - 5th Nov 2008

Israel replaces mosques with synagogues - 5th Nov 2008:

"Israel has sparked widespread controversy with its construction of a synagogue in the place of a mosque in Jerusalem (al-Quds)."



Palestine Video - A Palestine Vlog

Israel pushes on with "tolerance museum" on Muslim site - 1 Nov 08

Israel pushes on with 'tolerance museum' on Muslim site - 1 Nov 08:

"Israel's supreme court has given the go-ahead for a Jewish Museum of Tolerance to be built on the site of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.

The decision has outraged many people who see the move as yet another attempt to erase ancient Arab heritage in the city.

The cemetery is said to contain bones dating back to the earliest decades of Islam in the 7th century.

Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros reports."


See Article Below and a Second Video at the bottom of this page

Jonathan Cook

The National

November 05 2008

JERUSALEM // Israel seems to have little time for the irony that a modern Jewish shrine to “coexistence and tolerance” is being built on the graves of the city’s Muslim forefathers.

The Israeli Supreme Court’s approval last week of the building of a Jewish Museum of Tolerance over an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem is the latest in a series of legal and physical assaults on Islamic holy places since Israel’s founding in 1948.

The verdict ended a four-year struggle by Islamic authorities inside Israel to stop development at the Mamilla cemetery, which lies in the shadow of Jerusalem’s Old City walls, close to Jaffa Gate.

After the judgment, Jerusalem’s mufti, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein, called the museum’s building “an act of aggression” against the Muslim public.

The furore from both religious and secular Palestinians has apparently bemused most Israeli observers.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, initiator of the project, dismissed objections last week as cover for “a land grab by Islamic fundamentalists, who are in co-operation with Hamas”. His view that Muslim concerns are really an attack on the Jewish state’s sovereignty is shared by many.

Such sentiments have confirmed to most Palestinians the degree to which Israeli authorities make decisions while oblivious of Palestinian religious and national rights.

Although Muslim leaders angrily warned from the outset that the Museum of Tolerance would require the disinterring of graves, they were ignored until spring 2006, when it was reported that dozens of skeletons had been unearthed during the early excavations.

The local media also revealed at the time that state archaeologists had been secretly trying to move the skeletons without alerting the local Muslim authorities, as they should have done, and that many of the skeletons had been damaged in the process.

When several months of arbitration between the developers and Muslim leaders proved fruitless, the courts stepped in.

Ostensibly, the driving force behind the museum, which is to cost US$250 million (Dh918m), is the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a private Los Angeles-based Jewish human rights organisation. But the venture is being pushed through with equal vigour by Israeli officials from the government, Jerusalem municipality and Lands Administration.

For many years it has been their priority to obscure all indications of the Muslim presence in the western part of Jerusalem – as well as in many areas of Israel – that predate the Jewish state’s founding in 1948.

The treatment of the Mamilla cemetery, which is said to include the burial sites of the Prophet Mohammed’s companions, stands in stark contrast to another ancient cemetery, nearby on the Mount of Olives.

Since East Jerusalem was illegally occupied by Israel in the 1967 war, the Jewish cemetery on the Mount has been carefully renovated and expanded as a “heritage site”.

In contrast, the Mamilla cemetery, which lies just inside West Jerusalem and was captured by the Israeli army in the 1948 war, was immediately removed from Muslim control. Classified as refugee property, it was passed on to a new Israeli official called the custodian of absentee property.

This was far from an isolated incident. Before the creation of Israel, as much as one-tenth of all territory in the Holy Land was managed as part of an Islamic endowment known as the waqf, bequeathed by Muslims for religious and charitable purposes.

After 1948, however, Israel seized all waqf property – in addition to private land belonging to refugees – and transferred it to the custodian.

Under pressure from the government in the 1950s, the custodian passed most of the undeveloped land, particularly farmland, on to a state-run body known as the Development Authority, which was charged with using it for the “public interest”. That usually meant using the profit from the land for the benefit of the Jewish public.

Other waqf property – mostly land on which holy places, including mosques and cemeteries, were located – was managed by special Islamic trusts established by the state.

This has provided the main defence adopted today by Israeli officials in justifying the siting of the museum. They say that an Islamic trust deconsecrated the Mamilla cemetery in 1964, thereby freeing up the land for development.

What they fail to point out, however, is that the Islamic trusts have no legitimacy among Palestinian Muslims in Israel, nearly one-fifth of the country’s total population, let alone among Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The Islamic officials on the trusts are widely seen as corrupt, appointed by the state because of their willingness to do the government’s bidding rather than because of their public standing or Islamic credentials.

They earned that reputation by rubber-stamping many land transactions of waqf property desired by the state. One of the most notorious occurred in the early 1960s when Muslim officials approved the sale of the large Abdul Nabi cemetery in today’s Tel Aviv for the building of a hotel and several Jewish housing developments.

This abuse of waqf land has provoked a simmering resentment among Israel’s Palestinian minority.

Last year Palestinians in the historic city of Jaffa, now little more than a suburb of Tel Aviv, tried to challenge the role of the Islamic trusts by petitioning the courts to turn control of waqf property over to genuine representatives of the Muslim public.

The government, however, refused to divulge what waqf property existed in Jaffa, claiming “the requested information would seriously harm Israel’s foreign relations”. This was presumed to refer to the damage that might be done to Israel’s image abroad should it be revealed to what uses the waqf property had been put.

Actual holy places have fared little better, with most now inaccessible even to Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Some, such as the 900-year-old Hittin mosque built by Saladin in the Galilee region, have been fenced off and left to crumble. Others are used by rural Jewish communities as animal sheds. And yet more have been converted into discos, bars or nightclubs, including the Dahir al Umar mosque – now the Dona Rosa restaurant – in the former Palestinian village of Ayn Hawd.

Similar dubious practices occurred with the Mamilla cemetery. From the 1950s, during a period of military government that imposed severe restrictions on all Palestinians living inside Israel, the graves and tombs belonging to Jerusalem’s most notable families began to decay. Part of the land was turned into a car park.

After the 1967 war, as Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, has noted, the Muslim authorities lobbied to be allowed to rehabilitate and maintain the graves, but were refused permission.

Instead, in 1992 the custodian transferred the site to the Jerusalem municipality, which used the land to establish an Independence Park, named for Israel’s victory in the 1948 war. Then a few years later the municipality transferred a parcel of the land to the Wiesenthal Center for its Museum of Tolerance.

As Mr Benvenisti points out, over the years many Islamic sites in Jerusalem have been “turned into garbage dumps, parking lots, roads and construction sites”.

What makes the latest fight over the Mamilla cemetery different is that in the past decade a new breed of Muslim leader has emerged in Israel to overshadow the Islamic trusts. In particular the struggle over the fate of the holy places has been taken up by the leader of the Islamic Movement inside Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah.

Last week he warned: “We will mobilise in the Arab and Muslim world so that it puts pressure to halt the project.”

Tolerance, after all, has its limits.

Palestine Video - A Palestine Vlog

Israeli court rules in favor of destroying Muslim cemetery

Israeli court rules in favor of destroying Muslim cemetery
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:32:16
Shireen Yassin, Press TV, Al-Quds


(Requires Windows Media or Real Player)

Israel opens synagogue in eastern Al-Quds to Muslims' fury

Israel opens synagogue in eastern Al-Quds to Muslims' fury
Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:23:44
Shireen Yassin, Press TV, Al-Quds

The synagogue is built in the Muslim quarter on occupied Palestinian land, in violation of International Law. It is only 50 meters away from Islams third holliest mosque and is linked to tunnels leading to the same mosque. Jewish extremists have repeatedly attempted to destroy the mosque and build a Jewish temple in its place.

Click here to see this Press TV Video - Requires Windows Media

Mosaic News - 08/14/08 - World News from the Middle East

Mosaic News - 8/14/08: World News from the Middle East:

"Mosaic needs your help! Donate here: http://linktv.org/contribute
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'Iran's VP in Trouble,' Al Jazeera TV, Qatar
'Ahmadinejad Visits Turkey,' Press TV, Iran
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Produced for Link TV by Jamal Dajani."

J'lem cemetery desecration protested

J'lem cemetery desecration protested:
"Al-Jazeera 080805
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