Day of Rage brings new rioting to Temple Mount

The Palestinians had promised a Day of Rage, and that is what it was. Fury, stoked by the loss of scores of lives, yesterday extinguished all efforts to try to re-establish peace in Israel and its occupied territories.

The Palestinians had promised a Day of Rage, and that is what it was. Fury, stoked by the loss of scores of lives, yesterday extinguished all efforts to try to re-establish peace in Israel and its occupied territories.

By mid-afternoon, one of the entrances to Jerusalem's Old City - the 16th-century Lion Gate built by the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent - was in Arab hands again.

Thirty-three years ago Israeli paratroopers marched through the same gate on their way to conquer the Haram al-Sharif - although they called it the Temple Mount - paving the way for the annexation of east Jerusalem days later.

Yesterday it was conquered anew, albeit symbolically and briefly, by a handful of masked rioters who set fire to the police post within, causing great gusts of black smoke to billow from the arrow slits.

All afternoon, the youths strutted, shouted, dodged rubber bullets and stun grenades, and threw large rocks at the Israeli police in the nearby cemetery outside the city walls. Bleeding and bruised, at least 20 were carted away by ambulance, would-be martyrs in an up-rising that now has a momentum of its own and which, elsewhere in Gaza and the West Bank, claimed four more Palestinian lives yesterday. Those deaths mean more funerals, more crowds, and another turn of the wheel of violence.

The trouble began after Friday prayers on the Haram al-Sharif, the 35-acre plaza crowned by a golden dome in the heart of Jerusalem, which was the single biggest obstacle to what was always, in the long run, a doomed peace deal. Both sides were expecting the worst and appear to have made sincere efforts to avert it.

Unprecedentedly, Israeli police were withdrawn from all the entrances. The crowds were less than half the usual size because the Israelis closed the occupied territories for four days. The sermon by a leading cleric was moderate, urging worshippers to do nothing to justify bringing the Israeli forces back on to the mount.

It was a wildly reckless visit to this site - home to Islam's al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock sacred also to Jews - by Ariel Sharon, chairman of Israel's Likud party, that ignited the current round of violence.

At first the crowd seem subdued. As the Palestinian worshippers left there was a half-hearted flurry of stone-throwing at the Jews worshipping below the mount at the Western Wall but it died after 15 minutes. Then, moments later, the day of rage - ordered by Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation and the militantHamas movement which opposes the Oslo accord - began in earnest. It was sparked when the crowds spotted a solitary Israeli policeman.

The sound of battle echoed around the narrow streets. I was standing on a roof with some black-hatted ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious students in the Old City's Jewish quarter. Their reaction was another insight into the affliction of this region. "Who is shooting whom?" said Joseph Ross, 19, from Stamford Hill, London. Israelis are shooting Palestinians, we replied. "Good," he said firmly. "They shouldn't have been throwing stones."

On the streets below, a youth of about the same age - but from Fatah's youth wing - said the stones were only the beginning. "We haven't achieved much," said Murad, as he stood by the smouldering Lion's Gate on the eastern edge of the Old City, "People will only calm down when we get our land back."

Despite the injured - which included a 12-year-old boy, reported to be seriously hurt, and a Chicago Tribune reporter, roughed up because he was American - the rioters were given the "velvet glove" treatment by the Israelis in Jerusalem, which was teeming with television cameras.

Israel has been stung by the attention the world has given to their excessive use of force in this conflict - captured in the slaughter by an Israeli bullet of a 12-year-old boy, Mohammed al-Durah, huddling at his father's side in Gaza.

In the past week, Israeli snipers, highly trained and with accurate equipment, have shot dead children. Israeli helicopter gun ships have fired rockets into apartment buildings. True, their well-fortified bunkers have come under attack by Palestinians firing thousands of rounds Kalishnikovs and hurling Molotov cocktails. But the ratio of the dead reflects the imbalance - 70 Palestinians to three Israelis.

Absurdly, much of this has been done in the name of defending tiny pockets of territory and Jewish settlements on occupied land that Ehud Barak knows should not be there, and would have handed back in a peace agreement.

The Palestinians are targeting these places, pounding them daily with rocks and Molotov cocktails. They have concluded that their chances of success are higher by using violence, than by waiting for the peacemakers.

One of the worst trouble spots is a scrap of land in Nablus, where 10 Israelis soldiers - mostly Druze Arabs - have been under siege for a week defending a Jewish holy site of doubtful theological history which is coveted only by a handful ultra-Orthodox fanatics.