Police thwart demonstrators at shrine

JERUSALEM -- Attempts by Jewish and Islamic activists to confront each other in Jerusalem's storied Old City were thwarted yesterday by Israeli police and the Muslim religious trust that oversees Al Aqsa Mosque, but tensions increased on both sides over the upcoming Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the northernmost corner of the West Bank.

Jewish groups opposed to the withdrawal from the occupied territories had called for a mass movement to pray on the hill revered by Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. Only a few hundred activists came; 3,000 National Police officers had been deployed in advance of the demonstration and arrested would-be leaders.

Police and border patrol officers, who were stationed at every corner and alleyway of the unusually quiet Old City, also prevented West Bank and Jerusalem Muslims younger than 40 from entering the mosque compound.

Thousands of Muslims circumvented the ban by sleeping overnight Saturday in the mosque compound, but when some of them tried to leave the compound to confront the Jewish activists, they were blocked by officers of the Muslim trust, known as the ''waqf." Eight Palestinians and an Israeli policeman were injured when Palestinians responded with stone-throwing to Jewish attempts to pray on the mount.

Hassan Yousef, a leader of the Islamic extremist group Hamas, apparently entered the area in defiance of the police order and was arrested when he tried to return to his residence in the West Bank. Four members of Israel's parliament who came to the area in support of the Jewish protesters also were blocked from entering the compound.

In Tel Aviv, opponents of Israel's disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank burned tires and sat on the Ayalon Freeway, the central artery of the city, during rush hour Sunday -- the start of the workweek for most Israelis. Tens of thousands of cars were backed up, and there were some direct confrontations between the demonstrators and Israelis angry that they could not reach their offices.

Police said 33 demonstrators were arrested in the Tel Aviv area and 31 in Jerusalem. Most of those arrested in Jerusalem were taken into custody on suspicion of intent to disrupt public order and were released after promising not to return to the walled Old City for periods ranging from one to five days. In Tel Aviv, where the disruption was far greater, there were no immediate releases.

Despite the small turnout, some Jewish activists said they achieved their objectives in Jerusalem by forcing the start of a national dialogue on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount -- prayer that has been banned for centuries, even after Israel took the mount from Jordan in the Six-Day War in 1967 -- and by forcing the deployment in Jerusalem of thousands of police and security officials who otherwise would have been at work elsewhere.

Opponents of the disengagement say they plan major disruptions of Israel's highways and power system to stop the withdrawal, which is scheduled to begin July 20, and they believe their ability to force massive deployments in Jerusalem will aid that effort. Security officials say a conflagration over the Temple Mount would be the last, best hope of those intent on stopping the disengagement, who have suffered a series of political defeats at the hands of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Muslim officials banned all visits by non-Muslims to the mount -- site of the biblical temples of Solomon and Herod -- at the outbreak of the most-recent round of Palestinian-Israel violence, in September 2000. Israeli officials reopened the area to Christian and Jewish visitors about 18 months ago over Muslim objections, but maintained the longstanding ban on non-Muslim prayer there.

David Ha'Ivri, chairman of Revava, or The 10,000 -- the group that tried to organize the prayer march onto the mount -- was detained when he tried to enter the Old City. He said the purpose of the attempt to enter the Temple Mount was to ''demand freedom of religion and movement. The Temple Mount is the national symbol of Judaism and Zionism."

Ha'Ivri said the group believes that Sharon became prime minister as a reward from heaven for entering the Temple Mount himself and ensuring access for other Jews, but that Sharon will soon fall from power for betraying his fellow Jews by limiting their access to the site.

Israel Meir Cohen, a Revava leader who was a longtime resident of Providence, R.I., before moving to Israel in 1982, was detained at dawn as he emerged from a lavatory near the Western Wall of the mount. He said events yesterday demonstrate that the major struggle in the region now is among Jews, not between Jews and Muslims: ''We have to know what we believe in and stand firm by it. . . . Our problem is not the Arabs, but the Jews. You can see it in the United States. Jews are getting married outside their religion, and that happens because they are not proud to be Jews. . . . There are 30 million Americans who understand that Israel belongs to the Jews because it says so in the Bible. Those are Christian Americans. But we Jews do not say it."

Yousef, the Hamas leader who was arrested while returning to the West Bank, sounded an alarm often voiced by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Yousef said the day's events demonstrated that ''Al Aqsa is in danger. The attempts to desecrate Al Aqsa have not ended."

After several months of calm, tensions also have reignited in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli troops killed three Palestinian teenagers Saturday. Palestinians say the boys were mowed down while playing soccer, but Israeli army spokesmen say they were involved in arms smuggling and were shot while running across a sealed border area in defiance of orders to halt. More than 70 rockets and mortars have been fired into Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip since the killings.