- Title: JERUSALEM: COLLAPSE OF PART OF 800 YEAR OLD WESTERN WALL OF OLD JERUSALEM
- Date: 15th February 2004
- Summary: (W6) JERUSALEM'S OLD CITY (FEBRUARY 15, 2004) (REUTERS) 1. WIDE OF TEMPLE MOUNT BEHIND THE WESTERN WALL 0.06 2. SLV DAMAGE NEAR WESTERN WALL, POLICE CORDON PREVENTING WORSHIPPERS FROM ENTERING/ ZOOM INTO CHAIRS AND WALL 0.17 3. VARIOUS OF DESTRUCTION WHERE 800-YEAR-OLD STONE EMBANKMENT, PART OF THE WESTERN WALL COLLAPSED 0.30 4. VAR
- Embargoed: 1st March 2004 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: JERUSALEM
- City:
- Country: Israel
- Reuters ID: LVAC825FLD2V3QHI2TYYKC49XLT8
- Story Text: 800-year-old ramp leading to Western Wall
collapsed.
Israeli police barred worshippers from part of
Jerusalem's Western Wall on Sunday (February 15) after an
800-year-old stone embankment collapsed during a rare
snowstorm.
The collapse of the rampart sparked fresh accusations
that unchecked building work was threatening a holy site
known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount and to
Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif.
Engineers were inspecting the site to determine the
cause of the damage and whether last week's earth tremor
played a part.
But while the Muslim Waqf, which administers the site,
said the damage was due to Israeli renovations of the
Western Wall plaza, an Israeli archaeologist blamed the
Waqf for allowing unsupervised construction itself.
Captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, it is a
frequent flashpoint of violence between Israelis and the
Palestinians.
The head of the Waqf said it had been complaining for
some time about Israeli work near to Islam's third-holiest
site.
Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar blamed the the Waqf
(the Muslim authority of east Jerusalem) for the collapse,
saying it's construction is unsupervised.
"We are crying out for a long time about the neglect
of the Temple Mount, due to superficial archaeology, and
also engineering supervising. We see that the Waqf
authorities, the Islamic authorities are destroying and
building, and (conducting) construction activity, and there
is no supervising" Mazar told Reuters television.
The Waqf says it is not carrying out unsupervised
construction. It has rejected calls for Israeli experts to
supervise activities there.
The collapse of the embankment adjacent to the section
of the Western Wall where women pray took place at the
start of a snowstorm on Saturday evening. It sent female
worshippers fleeing as rocks tumbled towards them.
Under Orthodox Jewish law, women and men must worship
separately.
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