No Tear Gas Fired Into Mosques During Arab Rioting, Israel Police Official Says

Police Minister Chaim Bar-Lev on Sunday vehemently denied widespread reports that Israeli security forces fired tear-gas grenades into mosques after last Friday’s Muslim services.

The former head of the armed forces told a Cabinet meeting that the tear gas was used only outside the Temple Mount and was directed against crowds assaulting police forces.

Bar-Lev said that while police would use “whatever means necessary to maintain law and order,” officers were under instruction not to enter mosques, the Muslim houses of worship.

At the Cabinet meeting, Education Minister Yitzhak Navon asked why, in the first place, armed police were sent into the Temple Mount area where the mosques of Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock are located, a zone where scores of Palestinians were injured during Friday’s confrontation.

Among Holiest Places

The area, among the holiest places in Islam, is sealed off from the rest of the Old City by buildings, walls and gates.

Also on Sunday, Brig. Gen. Yosef Yehudai, commander of the Jerusalem police, defended his forces’ actions in breaking up the Palestinian demonstration.

Yehudai said that an Israeli border policeman fired three warning shots inside the Al Aqsa mosque after young Palestinians dragged him inside and beat him severely with an iron bar.

The police commander’s statement came at a news conference called to counter the many reports from Palestinians and others that tear-gas canisters were hurled directly into the mosques.

Yehudai said that his forces were originally instructed to let the Palestinians, after the Friday service, march across the Temple Mount area.

American, Israeli Flags Burned

However, he said, they burned an Israeli flag and an American flag and then provoked the police by throwing rocks at the officers.

As for reports that the police reacted with indiscriminate beatings of worshipers with their long wooden riot batons, Yehudai said: “If they were beaten, it shouldn’t have happened. These things are currently being checked.”

The general, who personally commanded the 600 security men in the area, said: “The police were there because there was rioting. When there are riots, innocent people get hurt.”

He said that the only pistol shots fired Friday were by the border policeman in uniform who was pulled into the mosque and attacked.

His jaw broken and teeth knocked out, the policeman pulled his pistol from its holster and fired three shots into the air before his gun jammed.

His captors then led him outside the mosque and released him, without his weapon, Yehudai said.

Search for Pistol

Yehudai ordered the mosque to be closed, with about 3,000 worshipers still inside, until the pistol was found. A plainclothes policeman accompanied by a mosque official then entered the building and found the pistol stuck into the handles of a door, thus jamming it closed.

As to allegations by many of the thousands of Palestinian worshipers who were in the Al Aqsa mosque that tear gas was fired into the building, the police official said that fumes had certainly wafted into the mosque and that Palestinians might have picked up empty canisters later and thrown them into buildings.

Yehudai also said that his policy for handling the demonstrations that have racked the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip for six weeks has been “to maintain order, using force only when confronted by force.”

Delicated Security Problem

He added that the security problem is particularly delicate on Temple Mount, since it contains not only Muslim holy places, which the police were instructed not to enter, but also public spaces where it is the duty of the police to keep order.

Yehudai in trying to police Jerusalem with its population of Jews, Muslims, and Christians shares a dilemma with other senior officers in the occupied territories about how to maintain order while not overreacting against the Palestinian population.

In the occupied territories, the police and border patrolmen have historically been in charge and have been trained in riot control--except in times of major unrest like the current period when the army is used for local security duties.

And among senior military officers, with little experience in policing occupied territories, there appeared to be two different, contrasting concepts of maintaining security.

Dayan vs. Sharon Approach

One former government official, who declined to be identified, referred to the “Dayan approach versus the Sharon approach.”

According to his analysis, the late Defense Minister Moshe Dayan advocated minimal contact between Israeli security forces in the occupied territories and the Palestinian population in order to avoid confrontations.

This approach is currently being pushed within the government by Cabinet Minister Ezer Weizman, himself a former senior military officer.

By contrast, former Gen. Ariel Sharon, a leading hawk who is now minister of industry and trade in the Cabinet, has favored quelling every disturbance as soon as it occurs, with as much force as necessary.

“Sharon wants to put security forces nose to nose with any troublemakers, not giving up a single inch,” according to one Israeli familiar with the situation.

Army Caught in Middle

The army, sources say, is caught in the middle when its soldiers are forced to perform police duties.

“Soldiers and their officers are trained to be aggressive, to respond to threats by attacking,” explained an Israeli specialist.

“This approach, so effective in war, is less relevant to dealing with Palestinian young people throwing stones at you.”

Hirsh Goodman, a military commentator for the Jerusalem Post, said recently: “There is a growing realization in the defense establishment that the solutions it thought so feasible have proven not to be so. Despite the massive military presence, the unprecedented arrests, and the punitive measures, the riots continue and casualties mount.”

Among the equipment and techniques used by the army in pursuit of its police duties are tear gas, smoke grenades, snipers assigned to fire at the legs of riot leaders, roadblocks and curfew patrols.

But in using these techniques and in sending patrols into every Palestinian camp and major community, the army is finding it necessary to assign more and more soldiers to basic police duties.

Complaints From Conscripts

“Many soldier conscripts are complaining to their friends back home that they did not join the army to be policemen,” one informed Israeli source said.

And another Israeli specialist summed up: “Like many armies, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) has not been trained in the more sophisticated techniques of riot control. And that has begun to be a large part of the problem here now.”

Meanwhile, there were these other developments, according to wire service reports:

--Angela Williams, acting director of the Gaza district of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, dispatched eight truckloads of powdered milk, vegetables and bread to wait outside the camps until the military allowed them inside.

“Our perception is that people are hungry, but they are not starving,” she said.

--The Israeli Supreme Court ordered the government not to expel from the Gaza Strip four Palestinian activists accused of inciting the unrest until it has heard their appeals against deportation. Four West Bank residents were deported to Lebanon last week after refusing to appeal their cases.

--U.N. envoy Marrack Goulding, ending a week’s visit to the troubled area, said the Palestinian uprising shows “that 20 years of Israeli occupation of the territories has produced a situation that really isn’t tolerable for either side.”