Hundreds of Palestinians have been wounded after Israeli forces raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque for the second time in four days, with reports showing police fired rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas at Palestinian worshipers. Palestinians have been staging weeks of protests to block Israel from evicting dozens of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem to give their homes to Jewish settlers, which the United Nations has described as a possible war crime. Mohammed El-Kurd, a writer and poet who is organizing to save his family’s home in Sheikh Jarrah, says the world is seeing colonialism in action in Palestine. “What’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah today is nothing short of ethnic cleansing,” El-Kurd says in an interview from Jerusalem. “We are seeing the Israeli government literally doing everything it can to terrorize Palestinians, whereas Israeli settlers can just walk around our neighborhoods, steal our homes and wield their guns, no questions asked whatsoever.”
To sum up what’s been happening in Al-Aqsa Mosque, it’s complete state-settler collusion. It’s clearly that the Israeli occupation forces are working in service of the Israeli settlers to terrorize and assault Palestinian worshipers. In their mosque today, Palestinians have been met with rubber-coated bullets in the face and in the upper body, tear gas inside the mosque at the women and the children praying in there, in addition to many other forms of brute force.
— source democracynow.org | May 10, 2021