Court bars removal of
By ETGAR
LEFKOVITS
The Supreme Court on Monday issued a temporary
injunction barring the state from removing thousands of tons of earth and
rubble mixed with assorted archaeologically rich artifacts laying
on
The swift interim ruling issued by Justice Jacob Turkel - which was handed down the afternoon after the
non-partisan 'Committee Against the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple
Mount' took the Government of Israel and the Antiquities Authority to court -
bars the state from removing the mounds of earth until a further ruling on the
matter, and gives the state 45 days to present their claims on the issue.
The petition to the High Court was filed Monday
over recent plans to remove thousands of tons of earth and rubble mixed with
assorted archaeologically rich artifacts uncovered during past construction
work carried out by the Islamic Wakf on the Temple
Mount.
The plan, which was originally approved last month
by the Antiquities Authority only to be temporarily suspended last month after
the committee of archaeologists got wind of the project, would have seen the
earth loaded on the trucks, under the supervision of an archaeologist from the
Antiquities Authority and then sorted a different site, officials said.
But the public committee of archaeologists and
public officials, which was set up five years ago in the wake of past
destruction of antiquities on the Temple Mount as a result of Wakf construction, said that the earth should not be
removed from the compound, and must be sorted at the site.
"It cannot be that earth filled with
antiquities, which needs to be hand-checked on the spot, will be loaded on trucks
by tractors which will bring about additional and irrevocable archaeological
destruction," a letter sent by the committee to Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon last month read.
The letter and similar ones sent to other
government officials went unanswered, prompting the committee to take the
unprecedented step of petitioning to the High Court of Justice on the matter,
the 13-page petition filed Monday read.
The High Court petition was signed by some of
Israel's leading archaeologists including the head of Haifa University's
archeology department, Prof Roni Reich, the deputy
head of Israel's Archaeological Council, Professor Eliezer Oren, the former
head of Tel Aviv university's archeology department, and past head of the
Israel's Archaeological council, Prof Moshe Cochavi,
Hebrew University Temple Mount expert Dr. Eilat Mazar, as well as by prominent Israeli authors A. B. Yehoshua and Yizhar Smilanski, and the executive vice chairman of the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein.
The piles of earth, mixed in with heaps of garbage
and construction materials, have been sitting on the eastern side of the
The site was secretly turned into the biggest
mosque in the country, which can accommodate 30,000 people.
Following its completion, Wakf
officials dumped more than 12,000 tons of earth, with history-rich artifacts,
at a garbage dump outside the
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While
In contravention of the law, Israeli archaeologists
from the Antiquities Authority have not been carrying out supervision for the
past four years now at the bitterly contested site due to their concern about
renewed Palestinian violence, despite the reopening of the compound to
non-Muslims last year.
With violence flaring in the region, neither the
government nor the Antiquities Authority have ever
pressed for renewed archaeological inspection on the compound.