Excavations are set to resume on the ramp in the Western Wall plaza that leads to the Temple Mount. 

From Arutz-7:

Archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) were told by the cabinet on Sunday to resume their excavations at the Rambam (Mughrabi) Gate leading to the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, with all due haste.
They were also told to work with “full transparency” and in coordination with “relevant bodies” so as to complete construction of a new permanent foot bridge to the Western Wall as soon as possible. The bridge is to be used by visitors and also by police. Work being carried out to replace the current walkway, which partially collapsed in a storm in 2004, was halted in June in response to rioting by enraged Muslims who claimed the work was a plot to weaken the foundations of the Al Aqsa mosque.
The construction site is located 60 meters away from the mosque and was found by numerous Israeli and international engineers to be no threat to the structure. Nonetheless, a new plan was proposed by Jerusalem planning officials that called for a shorter bridge along the existing route, and which would require less excavating and fewer pillars. A budget of NIS 3.5 million has been allocated for the project.
In the wake of the Muslim riots, UNESCO investigators were sent by the United Nations to inspect the repair work being carried out on the broken footbridge.

The rest of the story reviews other developments related to the Temple Mount in the past year.  We covered this story before here and here.

Zachi Zweig gives his perspective on the “Material from First Temple Period found on Temple Mount” story.  Zweig works with Barkay on the Temple Mount Debris Sifting project and his website on The Temple Mount Archaeological Destruction has done the most to make the issues known to the public.

I have updated the “Muslims Recognize Temple’s Existence” post with a link to a scanned copy of “A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif,” published in 1925.  Thanks to Sean Q for finding and sharing the book.

From Arutz-7:

A group of 150 Israeli citizens have filed a class action suit against the Moslems who run the Temple Mount site for having destroyed Jewish antiquities there.

The suit, brought by the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center, charges that Islamic officials have engaged in the deliberate destruction of ancient Jewish relics on the Temple Mount. The indictment was filed in the Jerusalem District Court last week, and Shurat Hadin sources say it is the first of its kind in Israeli legal history….

She explained that the 150 plaintiffs are acting as representatives of the Jewish People, who are the owners of the Temple Mount and therefore the injured party as a result of the Waqf actions at the holy site…

The suit accuses members of the Waqf of intentionally demolishing priceless Jewish artifacts, including remains from the Second Temple.  In recent months, the Waqf has brought in bulldozers and heavy digging equipment for the purpose of digging a long trench on the Mount, supposedly to replace electrical cables.  “Israeli archaeologists who sifted through the discarded earth,” the Law Center reports, “were shocked to discover a great number of Jewish artifacts brutally trashed by the bulldozers. A wall from the outer courtyard of the Second Temple is believed to have been completely pulverized.”

The full story is here.

I don’t have access to the particular guide referenced, but I don’t doubt that it is true. Of course, the statement was made in a different day and age. But now that politics are different, so is truth.

From a letter to the editor, Jerusalem Post, Oct 31, 2007:

Sir, – I read with interest “Jerusalem mufti: Western Wall was never part of Jewish temple” (October 25).
The kind of denial by former mufti Ikrema Sadi is somehow disputed by no more and no less than the institution he represents: the Supreme Muslim Council. In an official guide published by the council in 1930, it states: “This site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. It’s identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which ‘David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings’ from 2 Samuel XXIV, 25.”

The rest is here.

UPDATE (11/21): Reader Sean Q has located a copy of the guide and has scanned it. You can download it in pdf format here.

There is news for three items related to the Temple Mount:


Quarry: The Orthodox Union has new photos online (or if you prefer a slide show)


First Temple Period Remains: Leen Ritmeyer has marked out the find location on a couple of diagrams.  The discovery matches his previous conclusion that this area was within the temple area of Hezekiah’s time.


Temple Mount Destruction: The transcript from the government meeting about the bulldozer excavations is now online in Hebrew.  Yitzhak Sapir has made the following observations:

Present at the meeting were archaeologists Yuval Baruch (district archaeologist of Jerusalem for the IAA), Gabriel Barkai and Meir Ben-Dov, as well as Shuka Dorfman, head of the IAA. Eilat Mazar was also invited but she doesn’t appear to speak during the meeting.
Aside from their statements on the topics, which are really interesting, there are also some interesting statements by Limor Livnat, who was in the past Minister of Education and responsible for the IAA, and an architect who claims that when the dig began two months ago, he found a segment of the Northern Wall of the Temple, that was covered up the next day.