Israel Bars Palestinians From Temple Mount Prayer Services

Israel used curfews, roadblocks and water cannons Friday to stop thousands of Arabs from attending prayer services on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, where police killed 19 Palestinians earlier this week.

In the occupied territories, troops shot and killed two Palestinians and wounded 10 in clashes with stone-throwing youths, Arab reports said.

In Damascus, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical guerrilla group, claimed its fighters had killed seven Israeli soldiers Friday in revenge for the episode at the Temple Mount.

A guerrilla spokesman said the killing was done with a remote-control bomb set off under an Israeli military vehicle near Jezzine inside Israel’s so-called security zone in southern Lebanon.

However, a military spokesman in Jerusalem said he knew nothing of any such attack.

Also Friday, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said Israel would reject any effort by the U.N. Security Council to send a team to investigate the Temple Mount deaths, which occurred Monday.

Shamir said a U.N. investigation would be an infringement on Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. Israel captured the Arab sector, which contains the Temple Mount, from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War and later annexed it.

The Temple Mount is the site of the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosque, both sacred to Muslims, and also the Western Wall, Judaism’s most holy site.

“In the recent past in the Middle East, there have been a number of incidents where people were killed,” the prime minister told Israel radio. “We did not see the Security Council being pressured to such grave discussions and with such broad outcomes.”

Shortly after Shamir spoke, a Palestinian human rights group, Al Haq, issued its preliminary report on the killings, calling them a massacre and urging “international protection” for Palestinians.

The group said that massive stone throwing, which police say prompted their gunfire, did not begin until after tear gas was fired onto the Temple Mount. It also accused border police units of opening fire without warning.

A number of Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall were injured by the stone throwers.

On Friday, hundreds of police and paramilitary units were on duty around the Temple Mount, and a helicopter circled above.

Palestinians from the West Bank were stopped by army roadblocks from approaching Jerusalem. In the city, police blocked hundreds of young men from walking to prayers, halting them at the gates to the Old City or to the Temple Mount.

Police turned water cannons on a group of 200 Palestinian youths who tried to march to the Temple Mount. The youths retreated to a nearby street and pelted passing cars with stones.

About 2,000 managed to attend the prayers, about one-fifth the usual Friday crowd.

Many Palestinians also were blocked from prayers by army curfews. More than one million Palestinians in Arab East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip confined to their homes for a fifth day because of Monday’s riot.

Residents of the Gaza Strip used a two-hour lifting of the curfew Friday to burn tires and shout anti-Israeli slogans in street demonstrations, residents said.