Disputed holy site caught in archaeological tug of war

JERUSALEM -- At Jerusalem's most bitterly contested religious shrine, there's now one more issue in dispute -- renovations at the two hilltop mosques.

The Muslims who control the site, which they call Haram as-Sharif, say extensive digging at the compound in recent months has created more prayer room for worshippers and has not harmed anything of historical value.

Israeli archaeologists counter that the work has caused irreversible damage to what Jews call the Temple Mount, the site of the ancient Jewish temples dating back 3,000 years -- and the spot where the latest Mideast bloodletting erupted last September.

What had been a thorny political and religious dispute over who would have sovereignty over the site has widened to include a battle pitting Israeli archaeologists against Palestinian officials and the Waqf, the Islamic trust that runs the site day to day.

Although the quarrel is essentially archaeological, it has taken on political and religious overtones amid the fighting that has killed more than 600 Palestinians and more than 160 Israelis.

1,300 years old

At the center of the dispute are the Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest shrine, and the Dome of the Rock, from where Muslims believe the 7th century Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. Both shrines were built about 1,300 years ago.

The compound was built atop the ruins of the holiest site in Judaism, where the first and second temples stood before their destruction in 586 B.C. and A.D. 70, respectively.

Some Israelis claim the Muslims' excavations in the compound are designed to rob the Jews of any future claims to the hilltop by destroying remains of the two temples.

Israeli rabbis, authors and archaeologists have formed the Committee to Prevent the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount, of which archaeologist Eilat Mazar of Hebrew University is a leading member.

The committee has taken its campaign to the courts, the Internet and the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

It also has taken it to the sky, chartering aircraft to take aerial photos of the site, which has been closed to non-Muslims since the Islamic uprising began last fall with a battle between Palestinian stone throwers and Israeli security forces inside the compound.

'Politically motivated'

Muslims say Jewish complaints are overblown.

"All our work has been restricted to the existing structures," said Sheik Mohammed Hussein, director of Al Aqsa Mosque. "Their claims are politically motivated and seek to bring about Israeli control."

Mazar, the archaeologist, disagrees.

She says the Waqf used an Israeli government permit issued in 1999 to open two emergency gates on one side of Al Aqsa to carry out a major dig in an underground structure known to Christians and Jews as Solomon's Stables and to Muslims as the Marawani mosque. She said the trust also removed dirt that had filled another underground structure that Muslims call the old Al Aqsa Mosque.

"They have taken out 20,000 tons of fills and trucked them to garbage dumps without any archaeological supervision," Mazar said while going through photos clandestinely taken of the compound.

One shows a stone cutter that Mazar contends is being used to make tiles from ancient stones.

Jon Seligman, Israel's chief archaeologist in Jerusalem, says the stones belong to the 19th century.

But archaeologists who sifted through the dirt at the garbage dumps say they have found pottery and masonry stones from the eras of the first and second temples, Roman, Byzantine and early Muslim periods.