Court bars removal of Temple Mount artifacts
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 Jerusalem's Temple Mount, just hours after a group of leading Israeli archaeologists and public officials filed a petition to the High Court of Justice against their removal.

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 Temple Mount for at least four years, archaeologists said, and date back to the massive unilateral Wakf construction work carried out in the late 1990s at an architectural support of the mount, known as Solomon's Stables.

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 Old City, an action which the Antiquities Authority later called "an unprecedented archaeological crime."

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While Israel maintains overall security control at the site, the Wakf is charged with day-to-day administration of the compound.

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.