Israel Will Snub Inquiry by U.N. : Jerusalem: Cabinet decides not to receive team probing Temple Mount violence. Housing chief Sharon seeks to spur building in disputed sector of the city.

Israel will refuse to receive U.N. investigators preparing to look into last week’s bloodshed at the Temple Mount, the government announced Sunday, and officials continued to express dismay over U.S. backing for the inquiry.

In a clear slap both at efforts by the United Nations to investigate the violence in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, and at U.S. opposition to continued new settlement in annexed Arab districts, Housing Minister Ariel Sharon announced new incentives for contractors to build in the disputed eastern half of the city.

Israel’s refusal to officially receive the three-member U.N. mission was agreed upon at a four-hour meeting of the rightist-dominated Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

“The government unanimously rejected (the U.N.) decisions, and they (the decisions) prompted Israel’s refusal to receive this delegation,” said Foreign Minister David Levy.

The U.N. Security Council late Friday unanimously condemned Israel for the killing of at least 19 Palestinians in violence Oct. 8 at the Temple Mount and asked Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar to send a mission to Jerusalem to investigate the incident.

Yosef Ben-Aharon, a top aide to Shamir, said that Israel does not expect the U.N. delegation to come. “There is no ambiguity,” he said. “The government says we won’t receive them, and that means they cannot come. We won’t put up a barricade, but they can’t come.”

There had been some question about the precise meaning of the rejection because the Cabinet turned down a proposal by Sharon, a hawkish former minister of defense, to physically bar the group.

Opposition to the U.N. investigation puts Israel in conflict not only with the entire 15-member U.N. Security Council but also with the United States, which helped frame the resolution and voted for it.

With its rejection, the Shamir government risks sharper U.N. action, perhaps sanctions, Israeli officials admitted. “We hope it will not come to that,” said government spokesman Yossi Olmert. “We had to express how we felt.”

The U.N. team has been asked to travel to Jerusalem to look into the violence and report back to Perez de Cuellar by Oct. 24.

Israeli officials were incensed by several aspects of the U.N. condemnation. First, the vote implied a U.N. right to intervene in the affairs of Jerusalem, which Israel considers its indivisible capital. Neither the United Nations nor the United States recognizes the annexation by Israel of Arab districts of the city after the 1967 Middle East War; Washington maintains separate consulates in the western and eastern parts of the city.

The U.N. resolution described Israel as the “occupying power” with responsibility to protect civilians in “all the territories occupied by Israel since 1967,” an implicit inclusion of Jerusalem.

“The government rejects completely any attempt to establish that Jerusalem is occupied territory,” Levy said. “Jerusalem in all its parts is the sovereign capital of Israel and therefore Israel will not receive the delegation.”

Sharon, as housing minister, has made an effort to beef up the Israeli population in East Jerusalem by not only announcing incentives for contractors to build there but also by unveiling plans to establish six new neighborhoods in the annexed half of the city to house arriving Soviet immigrants, Israel Radio reported.

It is not clear whether Sharon’s plan has full government approval.

Justice Minister Dan Meridor attacked wording in the U.N. resolution that called the Temple Mount area “Haram al Sharif,” or noble sanctuary, which is the Muslim name for the hallowed site.

The Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque, both Islamic shrines, stand in the disputed enclosure. Jews revere the site as the location of two biblical temples, one constructed by King Solomon and burned by Babylonian invaders and another renovated by Herod but destroyed by Roman legions in AD 70.

It was a reported plan by a Jewish fundamentalist group to lay the cornerstone of a third temple that inflamed Muslim passions last Monday before a riot took place on the grounds. Palestinians rained stones down on Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall, which acts as the retaining wall for the raised enclosure.

Police stormed the compound and opened fire, slaying 19 Arabs by the count of Israeli hospitals and 21 by the count of the Palestinians, who say that two of their dead were buried on the grounds of the shrines without having first been taken to the hospital.

The U.N. resolution expressed alarm about the Palestinian dead and injured as well as injury to “innocent worshipers,” a reference to 22 Jewish worshipers hurt at the Western Wall. But the resolution did not single out Palestinian stone-throwers for special censure.

Israeli officials charged that the United States was bowing to demands of Arab allies who have sent troops to the Persian Gulf to confront Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. The Israelis contend that the United States has fallen into a trap laid by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who has chided the world for rushing to block his annexation of Kuwait while allowing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to continue to simmer.

“Our relations with the United States are very important,” Levy, the foreign minister, declared. “But we should not accept and we should not ignore the sorrowful fact that the U.S. Administration has made a mistake, that the United States followed this coalition it formed against Saddam Hussein.

“By surrendering to this decision, it has made a linkage between what is happening in the gulf and the Israeli-Arab conflict,” Levy concluded.

The Israeli government has named its own investigative team to probe the riot at the Temple Mount and the police response. Since the United Nations has already condemned Israel, Israeli officials noted, why should the organization also send in an investigative team?

How IT HAPPENED: A recapitulation of the Temple Mount violence. A8