Israel Heightens Security for 'Day of Rage'
JERUSALEM, Israel -- Israel Police are on high alert again Friday following Palestinian calls for a "day of rage" after Muslim prayers.
An additional 800 officers are deployed throughout the city, and police placed age restrictions on males attending Friday prayers on the Temple Mount to 40 and older, after days of intervention to rein in Palestinian rioters on the contested site.
Two days earlier, friends and family attended the funeral of Alexander Levlovich, 64, killed in a terror attack in Jerusalem on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.
Earlier Wednesday, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas said the P.A. will not allow Israelis to desecrate the Temple Mount with their "dirty feet," while encouraging attacks on Jewish visitors there.
"Al-Aksa [referring to the Temple Mount] is ours and also the Church of the Holy Sepulcher," Abbas told Arab residents of east Jerusalem neighborhoods at his headquarters in Ramallah in a message aired on P.A. television. "They [the Jews] have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We won't allow them to do so and we will do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem."
"Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it's for the sake of Allah," he said. "Every shahid (Muslim martyr) will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded, by the will of Allah."
Dr. Dore Gold, Israeli Foreign Affairs director general, said Abbas' intent is clear.
"Today the world is divided between those trying to undermine religious coexistence and those trying to protect it," Gold said. "By saying that the 'filthy feet' of Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount desecrate it, Mahmoud Abbas has now clarified on which side he stands."
Meanwhile in the Gaza Strip, Islamic Jihad organized anti-Israel demonstrations, with protesters chanting "al-Aksa will not be divided."
Khaled al-Batch, a senior member of the terror group, accused Israel of breaking international law, calling on the Arab League and international supporters "to protect Jerusalem and prevent its judaization."
And in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv neighborhood, where the fatal terror attack took place, there's new wire fencing ostensibly to protect residents from rock and firebomb attacks from their neighbors in Jabel Mukaber.
"It looks to me like giving a painkiller to a cancer patient," Armon Hanatziv resident Nava Segev, whose home has been hit with rocks and Molotov cocktails, said.
"So now they are fencing the house that got 17 Molotov cocktails thrown at [it] the last week. They will move a bit forward and they will throw them at other houses like they already did," Segev said.
