Illegal Wakf construction continuing on Temple Mount

By By Etgar Lefkovits (Jerusalem Post March 1, 2001)

JERUSALEM (March 1) - Wakf officials are continuing to carry out construction work on the Temple Mount in the area near Solomon's Stables, a senior official in the Internal Security Ministry said yesterday, confirming repeated warnings by archeologists who have been protesting against the unsupervised work for the past year.

"The Wakf has been expanding the staircase leading to Solomon's Stables to reach the eastern wall," said Dr. Ami Gluska, a senior political adviser to Internal Security Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, who is the head of the interministerial committee that deals with construction work on the Temple Mount.

The work at the site dates back to 1999, after the Wakf had turned the Solomon's Stables into a mosque that can accommodate 10,000-15,000 worshipers. At the time, the police recommended that the Wakf be allowed to open an emergency exit to the site, since it had only one entrance, Gluska explained. The government approved the emergency exit in November 1999.

Instead, the Wakf constructed two elaborate archways six to eight meters under the surface, which "instead of becoming emergency exits became the main entrance to the site," he said.

Wakf officials even tried to make further entrances, but were stopped by the government. "The major construction work at the site over the past year, which was done with the acquiescence of the government, undoubtedly cause serious archeological damage," Gluska, who visited the site yesterday, said, adding that "ironically, a lot of the damage was done to layers of remains from the Islamic period."

Gluska said he hopes this is the "final stage" of Wakf building at Solomon Stables. "We hope that we are finished more or less with this unfortunate and serious work that was started a year ago," he said.

But Dr. Eilat Mazar, an archeologist from Hebrew University and a member of the Committee Against the Destruction of Antiquities, said that "those who think that the work will stop with the expansion of the staircase near Solomon's Stables are just being naive."

An aerial photograph the group had taken on Monday shows a tractor in action near Solomon's Stables, and the path of the tractor as it moved the rubble it had cleared from the area along the eastern wall of the Temple Mount.

"What we see here is the destruction of ancient arched structures just outside Solomon's Stables," she said in an interview at her office.

The area in question, Dr. Mazar said, dates back to the sixth century BCE.

"The ongoing work at the site makes more realistic the thesis that the aim of the Wakf is to turn the whole area from the Dome of the Rock to the eastern wall of the Temple Mount into one huge mosque, with Mecca-like dimensions," she said.

Jon Seligman, the Antiquities Authority's chief Jerusalem archeologist, refused to comment, saying the Antiquities Authority will have nothing to say on the matter since he is allowed to visit the site.

By police recommendation, the Temple Mount has been off limits to Israeli Jews and Christians - including archeologists - since the wave of violence erupted, rendering Seligman essentially powerless to carry out his supervisory work.

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