Strata

Furor Over Temple Mount Construction

Muslim Religious Body Snubs Israeli Law, Archaeological Concerns

Bulldozers have been carting away huge mounds of earth from underneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, one of the most revered sacred sites in the world, drawing the ire of Israeli archaeologists who say Muslim authorities are damaging the inside of the Mount’s eastern retaining wall and destroying possibly priceless historical information in the process.

The furor stems from a construction project undertaken by the Waqf, the Muslim religious authority that controls the Temple Mount, to create a second entrance to the al-Marawani mosque, located under the southeastern quadrant of the Mount in an area popularly, but mistakenly, known as Solomon’s Stables.

The huge underground mosque at times attracts thousands of worshipers, so there was no question that a second entryway was needed for safety reasons. But the Waqf’s decision to simply haul material from the area and to dump it, in the dead of night, in the nearby Kidron Valley has been attacked as irresponsible destruction of an archaeological site. Israeli archaeologists say the area should first have been subjected to a controlled excavation. Now personnel from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) can only sift through the dump in the Kidron Valley in hopes of gaining some raw, but contextless, data about ancient Jerusalem.