Israeli occupation authorities Monday barred eight Jerusalemite women from the Al-Aqsa Mosque for a week and told them to return and receive a new six-month ban order amid the ongoing tensions in Arab East Jerusalem and across the West Bank.
The Wadi Hilweh Information Center in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan, which documents Israeli violations, said in a report that Israeli police detained for hours about a dozen Jerusalem women for investigation as they left the compound.
Israel also handed Al-Aqsa Mosque guard Mukhtar Al-Tamimi an order keeping him away from the compound, one of Islam’s holiest shrines, for a week, and also detained two people, including a woman, at the Lion’s Gate in the Old City for allegedly taking pictures inside the shrine, it said.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, Israeli forces arrested 23 Palestinians during night-time military sweeps into Palestinian towns as clashes with the occupation army continued in a number of flashpoints.
The Palestinian Prisoners Club said in a statement that the occupation forces stormed various areas in the cities of Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah and
El-Bireh, as well as several Jerusalem neighborhoods and made the arrests.
Tension remains high across the occupied territories despite a ceasefire that ended 11 days of a deadly Israeli bombing of the blockaded Gaza Strip and rockets fired on Israeli settlements bordering Gaza, amid a standoff in the Jerusalem Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, where dozens of Palestinian families faced forced eviction from their homes.
Source: Jordan News Agency