Clashes have erupted between police and Palestinians at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in the latest violence to shake Jerusalem's flashpoint site holy to Muslims and Jews.
Police said they entered the compound this morning after Palestinian demonstrators threw stones at visitors to the holy site, known to Muslims as Al-Haram Al-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount.
Once inside, police themselves came under stone attack and had to wade through oil that had been spilled in an effort to make them slip and fall, public radio reported.
Firing stun grenades to break up the protests, the police left the site after less than an hour and closed access to the site.
Police re-entered the compound later in the morning after the rock throwing resumed and arrested 12 demonstrators.
Witnesses said that some 100 Palestinians remained inside the compound.
Kamal Khatib, a spokesman for the Israeli Arab Islamic Movement, which has been at the forefront of recent demonstrations at the compound, blamed police for the clashes.
He added that police were stopping busses filled with Muslim worshippers in northern Israel in a bid to prevent them from reaching Jerusalem.
The office of Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas warned of ‘dangerous consequences’ and called on Israel to ‘halt all provocative acts’.
Early today, police had deployed extra troops after calls for demonstrations around the holy site that has been the scene of clashes over the past several months.
The Palestinian calls for demonstrations came amid rumours that right-wing Jewish activists were planning to gather at the compound, the site of the holiest place in Judaism and third-holiest in Islam, radio reported.
The rumours circulated after an extreme right-wing Jewish group, the Organisation for the Defence of Human Rights on the Temple Mount, called on Jews to gather at the mosque compound as well as the adjacent Western Wall, Judaism's top pilgrimage site.
Today's incidents marked the latest violence to shake the holy site, where any perceived change in the status quo has often led to outbreaks of deadly clashes.
Two weeks of tensions over the compound exploded into violence on 27 September, when Palestinians hurled rocks at a group of visitors whom they suspected of being right-wing Jewish extremists.
Police, who responded with stun grenades, said the group was made up of French tourists.
The incident came in the midst of a month in which Jews mark three of their most important holidays and fuelled suspicions among Palestinians that Jewish worshippers would try to pray at the revered site during this period.
In September 2000, the second Palestinian uprising or intifada, erupted after Ariel Sharon, a right-wing politician who went on to become Israel's prime minister, visited the site.
