Israeli police storm into Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque, assault worshippers

Israeli police attacked dozens of worshippers in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound before dawn on Wednesday injuring several people.

The videos circulating online show fireworks going off and police beating people inside the mosque.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said seven Palestinians sustained wounds from rubber-tipped bullets and beatings in clashes with Israeli police, reports The Guardian. It said in a statement that Israeli forces were preventing its medics from reaching Al-Aqsa. But it did not elaborate on how many people were injured.

“I was sitting on a chair reciting (Qur’an),” an elderly woman told the Reuters news agency while sitting outside the mosque, struggling to catch her breath. “They hurled stun grenades, one of them hit my chest,” she said as she began to cry.

The Israeli police, however, claimed that they were responding to “rioting”. In a statement, they said that they were forced to enter the compound after “masked agitators” locked themselves inside the mosque with fireworks, sticks and stones.

“When the police entered, stones were thrown at them and fireworks were fired from inside the mosque by a large group of agitators,” the statement said, adding that a police officer was wounded in the leg.

The Israeli military said nine rockets were fired from Gaza toward Israel, of which at least four were intercepted and four landed in open areas.

Palestinian groups condemned the attack on worshippers, calling it a crime.

“We warn the occupation against crossing red lines at holy sites, which will lead to a big explosion,” said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Tensions have been high in occupied East Jerusalem and West Bank for past few months and there is a likely possibility that it could escalate this month as Ramadan, the Jewish Passover and Christian Easter converge.

Jordan, which acts as custodian of Jerusalem’s Christian and Muslim holy sites under a status quo arrangement in place since the 1967 war, condemned Israel’s “flagrant” storming of the compound.

Egypt’s foreign ministry, meanwhile, called for an immediate halt to Israel’s “blatant assault” on Al-Aqsa worshippers.

The attacks on Al-Aqsa, the third-holiest shrine in Islam and the most sacred site in Judaism in which it is referred to as the Temple Mount, have sparked deadly cross-border wars between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers in the past, the last being in 2021.

Hamas condemned the latest raid as “an unprecedented crime” and called on Palestinians in the West Bank “to go en masse to the Al-Aqsa mosque to defend it”.

Palestinians see Al-Aqsa as one of the few national symbols over which they retain some element of control. They are wary of a slow encroachment by Jewish groups as well as about far-right Israeli movements that want to demolish the Islamic structures in the Al Aqsa mosque compound and build a Jewish temple in their place.