Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques receives phone call from Jordan monarch, discussions focus on regional, int’l developments

Mubarak: Evasion won’t achieve interests for anyone, threatens grave consequences for all, on top of them Israel

Arab peace plan to stop destruction works, Israel’s desecration of al-Aqsa Mosque

King Abdullah II of Jordan warns of political stalemate in region

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud received tonight a phone call from Jordanian King Abdullah II.

During the call, bilateral relations as well as the latest developments in the region and the world were discussed.

In Cairo, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has received a phone call from U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden during which they discuss means to push forward the Middle East peace process and reviewed the current tour of U.S. Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell.

Mubarak urged Israel to resume peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, saying it will boost the confidence of the Arab world.

Mubarak, who has played a vital role in trying to persuade the sides to resume peace talks, made the statements in an interview he gave to Armed Forces magazine during the weekend to mark the 36th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war.

"Israel must reconsider its policies and its way of treating the Palestinians and Arabs," al-Arab Online Web site quoted Mubarak saying.

"If Israel chooses the path of peace ... this will encourage the Arabs to have confidence in its intentions," he said.

The Arab peace initiative proposes normalization of diplomatic relations between the Arab states and Israel in exchange for a "comprehensive peace which establishes an independent Palestinian state linked to the withdrawal by Israel from all Arab lands it has occupied since 1967," Mubarak was quoted saying.

Mubarak also referred to the recent attempts by U.S. President Barack Obama to revive the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, saying he was optimistic the American president's efforts would succeed.

"Urgent and serious actions as well as concrete measures " are needed to get the peace talks back on track, Mubarak said.

The Arab League has convened an emergency meeting in condemnation of the brutal aggression on al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli military forces as well as escalating tension in a-Quds.

"The (Thursday) meeting, chaired by Syria, focused on the Israeli violations of al-Aqsa Mosque," Vice Secretary General of the league Ambassador Ahmad Bin Hilli told reporters in Cairo, Egypt.

The League's deputy secretary general went on to note that the assembly also sought to devise an Arab action plan to fend al-Quds off Israel's serious and oppressive practices and prevent desecration of al-Aqsa Mosque.

The council condemned Israeli siege imposed on al-Quds and al-Aqsa Mosque and the policy of systematic ethnic cleansing pursued by Israeli authorities against the Palestinians.

It called upon international organizations to move on and mobilize international public opinion to end Israeli violations and destruction activities of Islamic and Christian sanctities.

The Arab group moreover demanded an urgent UN session to inspect the situation and take necessary procedures to stop the Israeli practices and protect Palestinian people's rights to their sacred land.

"Arab League also discussed available avenues to pressure Israel to freeze construction of housing units in illegal Jewish settlements across the occupied Palestinian territories," Hilli highlighted.

Tensions flared after Israeli police allowed Jewish extremists to enter the grounds of al-Aqsa Mosque last Sunday and then shielded them from attack by Palestinians defending the sacred place. After the eviction of the settlers by Muslim worshipers, the occupation forces turned on the crowds. About 16 Palestinians and several Israeli police were injured in the clashes.

Israeli police on Sunday lifted restrictions on access to Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound, a flashpoint site holy to Muslims and Jews that was cause for clashes and tensions for more than a week.

Amid the tensions, Israel a week ago closed access to the site, known to Muslims as Al-Haram Al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) and to Jews as the Temple Mount, to non-Muslim visitors and to Muslim males under the age of 50.

"Access to the Temple Mount has been re-opened normally on Sunday morning to Muslims without age restrictions as well as to visitors during regular hours," Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben Ruby told AFP.

Non-Muslims are allowed to visit the compound looking over Jerusalem's Old City between 0530 GMT and 0830 GMT and between 1030 GMT and 1130 GMT, he said.

The latest tensions over the compound exploded into violence on September 27, when Palestinians hurled rocks at a group of visitors whom they suspected of being rightwing Jewish extremists.

Police, who responded with stun grenades, said the group was made up of French tourists.

The incident came in the midst of a month in which Jews mark three of their most important holidays and fueled suspicions among Palestinians that Jewish worshippers would try to pray at the revered site during this period.

The Jewish holiday period ended on Saturday.

The site of the Al-Aqsa compound is the holiest place in Judaism and third-holiest in Islam and any perceived change in the status quo there has often led to outbreaks of deadly violence.

In September 2000, the second Palestinian uprising or intifada, erupted after Ariel Sharon, a rightwing politician who went on to become Israel's prime minister, visited the site.

As grand mufti of Jerusalem and orator of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Mohammed Ahmad Hussein has the power to sway millions of Muslims.

But in his three years since being appointed mufti – a title that dates to the British Mandate and bestows guardianship over the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem – Sheikh Hussein has been relatively reserved. He chooses his words carefully, stays above the political fray, and, despite his ability to issue fatwas, has not made any Islamic rulings that have engendered controversy.

Which is why, when he now says that Israel is creating tension in the holy city and endangering the Al-Aqsa Mosque, it's a sign that things are not business as usual in the disputed capital at the heart of the Middle East conflict.

"We are always giving a message of peace, of avoiding violence, of no aggressiveness," the mufti said in a rare interview on Thursday. "But the Israeli authorities are continually taking aggressive actions and creating a situation that leads to conflict."

Most unacceptable, he says, is Israel's move last week – not for the first time – to limit access to the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock complex to men over the age of 50. Israeli police say it's a temporary but necessary measure to keep out rabble-rousers looking to disturb the peace for Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worshippers seeking access to the city's elbow-to-elbow religious sites.

That explanation doesn't fly, Hussein says, and anger over the policy is only growing.

"Even if it were only one day when they did this, we would find it offensive and problematic. It blocks our freedom of worship," says Sheikh Hussein, a slight-framed, serious-minded man who sits in a well-appointed office beneath the portrait of the man who appointed him – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas – and another of the late Yasser Arafat.

"There are military checkpoints surrounding the mosque on all sides, and they inspect anyone who tries to enter," says Hussein, himself included.

It is difficult to predict how worrisome that anger might be and what it means in the short term. Friday midday prayers, the biggest of the Muslim week, are feared to be the site of clashes with Israeli police who maintain overall control of the area. Israeli police are on their second-highest level of alert. Not a day of the past week has passed without clashes somewhere in Jerusalem.

Earlier this week in Cairo, Qatari Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, head of the International Association of Muslim Scholars, called on Muslims to observe a "day of rage'" Friday in support of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

Hussein says he hopes that won't be read as a call to violence, but of steadfastness.

"We don't want conflict," he says, "but the feeling on the ground is indicating an escalation, if the Israelis don't change their approach."

Tensions near the city's holy sites and in East Jerusalem neighborhoods have been high since Sept. 27, the eve of Yom Kippur – the holiest day in the Jewish calendar – when young Palestinian men clashed with Israeli police near the holy sites.

But the focus over the past week has centered on the Islamic Movement of the North, a Muslim fundamentalist group which operates inside Israeli borders, centered in the town of Umm el-Fahm.

Israeli officials view its leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, to be a firebrand who is stirring up religious passions by warning Muslims that Israel is endangering the al-Aqsa Mosque by doing archeological excavations in the area.

On Wednesday, Salah was arrested on charges of incitement, then released after being barred from entering Jerusalem for 30 days.

The mufti defends Salah, and points to his being banned as an example of a policy that is serving to build resentment, not diffuse it.

"I don't think Sheikh Salah is the problem. He's done nothing against the law, and he has the right to visit al-Aqsa like any Muslim," Hussein says. "It's Israel's measures that have created the problem."

Not everyone agrees. Even some leaders in Sheikh Raed's own movement say his message is coming across too harshly, and could be communicated more peacefully.

"The battle cries by Sheikh Salah represent us in essence, but can be said differently, in a calmer tone," one of the movement's founders, Sheikh Hashem Abed al-Rahman, said in a statement.

Ata Ighbarieh, a member of the High Committee, an organization of Israeli-Arabs or Palestinians inside Israel, called for a more measured approach.

"Clerics like Raed Salah should work on calming down the Muslim masses in order to avoid loss of life," he says in a telephone interview. "As clerics, we should be responsible to maintain peace and stability for our people. The best way to do that is through dialogue, not harsh words."

"I believe that the Muslim reaction should be less intense, to give an opportunity to the Israeli government to oppress their own extremists," Ighbarieh says in reference to fringe Jewish groups that have for years been petitioning to pray on the same site as the mosques. The plateau is known as the Noble Sanctuary in Arabic and the Temple Mount in Hebrew, a reference to the site of the Second Temple destroyed in A.D. 70.

Israel's President Shimon Peres, visiting with rabbis on Thursday in the last days of the weeklong Sukkot festival, also known as Feast of the Tabernacles, said he was worried about a religious war in Jerusalem and concerned that "inciters can set the whole thing on fire."

Rabbi Yosef Sholom Elyashiv, considered one of the most senior Ashkenazi rabbis, said Jews are forbidden by religious law from walking on the Temple Mount at all. One, the site is so holy that no single Jew can be sure he is "allowed" to tread there, for it contains a place that in the days of the temple was reserved for high priests only. And two, in the modern context, it's is not worth the political outrage in could set off. Ariel Sharon's visit there in 2000 sparked riots that escalated into the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising.

"I have declared this in the past, and I repeat once again my statement," the rabbi says. "Beyond the halachic [legal] aspect, it is also a kind of provocation of the world's nations that could lead to bloodshed, and this would be one sin leading to another."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday blamed recent violence at Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque on Arab "extremist elements" whom he said spread lies that Israel intended to dig under the holy site.

Tensions in Jerusalem have risen over the past few weeks after Israeli police and Palestinian protesters clashed near al-Aqsa in the walled Old City on the eve of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur late last month.

Reasons for the confrontations at the flashpoint compound, which is revered by Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) and by Jews as the Temple Mount, were disputed. Israeli security forces control access to the area and regularly prohibit young Muslim men from entering the holy site in the Old City, citing security concerns.

In last month's violence, small groups of Palestinian stone-throwers confronted Israeli forces, and Israel banned the Israeli Arab head of a fundamentalist Islamist movement from Jerusalem, saying he was inciting violence.

"Extremist elements tried to disturb the peace and quiet in Jerusalem," Netanyahu told reporters at the weekly meeting of his cabinet.

"We are talking about a radical minority that spread lies that we intend to dig under the Temple Mount. I want to make clear that this is a lie," he said. "I appreciate that the majority of Israel's Arab citizens were not caught up in these provocations."

Muslim religious authorities have pointed to Israeli archaeological work near the compound as endangering the foundations of al-Aqsa, allegations Israel has long denied.

The violence in Arab East Jerusalem, which has since dissipated, was accompanied by warnings from Palestinians in senior positions of the risk of a third Intifada, or general uprising.

A Palestinian uprising erupted in 2000 after then-Israeli opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, toured the plaza above Judaism's Western Wall where al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock shrine now stand.

During Netanyahu's first term as prime minister, his opening of a new entrance to an archaeological tunnel for tourists near the holy compound touched off gun battles in which 60 Palestinians and 15 Israelis were killed.

Israel captured East Jerusalem in a 1967 war and annexed it in a move that has not won international recognition. Israel considers all of Jerusalem its "eternal and united" capital.

Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of the state they hope to establish in the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.