Thursday, May 25, 2023
Elder of ZiyonPalestinians are outraged by the Israeli government’s move to hold a weekly Cabinet meeting on May 21 inside the tunnels it has dug under Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Israel has not dug a single tunnel underneath the Temple Mount or under the mosque. All the tunnels that archaeologists have uncovered and excavated are adjacent to the Mount, or stretch hundreds of meters away from it.
For decades, Israel has been excavating under Al-Aqsa as part of a vague, historically motivated search for “Solomon’s Temple” in an attempt to justify the occupation through archeology.
However, after years of digging, Israelis, who claim they can trace their heritage to the land of Palestine, have found nothing linking their history to the Al-Aqsa region.
The only people who have excavated underneath the Temple Mount since the 19th century have been the Muslims of the Waqf.
They dug out hundreds of tons of debris removed to illegally build the huge underground Marwani Mosque at the site of what was (erroneously) called Solomon's Stables.
It was the biggest archaeological crime of the century.
The Temple Mount Sifting Project has been going through the truckfuls of debris - and found countless Judean artifacts from the times of the First and Second Temples.
One example is this bulla inscribed with the name of a well-known priestly family of First Temple-era Jerusalem, the children of Immer.
They also found the distinctive Herodian tiles from the Second Temple period. So we know Herod built something big there - now what structure could it have possibly been and described in detail by Josephus?
Najib is a liar.
Dozens of far-right Israelis visit the Al-Aqsa compound daily to show defiance and provoke Palestinians.
No, they (and visitors like me) visit to be at Judaism's holiest spot - a small fact that Najib doesn't mention to the readers.
In July 2017, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee issued a decision affirming that Israel has no sovereignty over the city of Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967. It condemned the excavations carried out by the Israeli Antiquities Department in the city.
UNESCO never condemned the Temple Mount excavations by the waqf - which continued on into the 21st century.
Ikrima Sabri, a preacher at Al-Aqsa Mosque, said that Israel was carrying out comprehensive excavations in the entire area, including the surroundings of Al-Aqsa.Sabri said the main objective of these excavations “is to search for antiquities belonging to the Jews, but they have not yet found any antiquities or stones related to ancient Jewish history, despite the extensive excavations that have been taking place since the city’s occupation in 1967.”
Besides the examples listed above, and the Temple Mount itself which can be seen to have been built and expanded by Jews, here is a photo of the beams on the roof of the Al Aqsa Mosque that were exposed when it collapsed in the 1927 earthquake.
The beams were removed and, decades later, examined with carbon-14 dating. Some date from the Second Temple and even First Temple periods, and they are cedar and cypress from Lebanon - used in the Temples and repurposed for a Byzantine church on the site and later for Al Aqsa.
This is serious evidence of a major 3,000 year old structure on the Temple Mount. If there is a serious theory that these belong to another ancient building, let's hear it. Especially since the stones of the retaining wall itself show clearly that they were built in different time periods corresponding to the known building and extensions of the Mount.
About 12 tunnels have been dug under Al-Aqsa, some reaching 450 meters in length. The excavation has led to the systematic destruction of many antiquities above and below the ground from all periods — from the Umayyad to the Ottoman
On the contrary: Israeli archaeologists have not only preserved Muslim buildings and artifacts - there are plenty in the Israel Museum which gives them as much prominence as the Christian and Jewish objects - but the only reason we know there was an Umayyad palace south of the Temple Mount is because Israelis discovered it and preserved it.
Notice how Najib defines "all periods" as only the Muslim era, discarding Jewish and Christian history in Jerusalem altogether.
This is not journalism. This is Palestinian propaganda that has not a shred of fact behind it.
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