The rampart fell but the Temple Mount is safe (Ha'aretz)
By Danny Rubinstein
Any news about the Al-Aqsa Mosque is immediately highlighted in the Palestinian press. That's what happened last week with the collapse of part of the northern wall of the rampart that leads from the southern entrance of the Western Wall up to the Mograbi Gate.
The collapse took place a week ago, some time after midnight between Saturday and Sunday. Al Quds, the most widely circulated Palestinian newspaper, wrote in its main headline on Monday that "the collapse of part of the path in the Al Bureq area is a renewed warning of the danger of collapse to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Al Bureq was the Prophet Mohammed's magical horse, which Muslim tradition says Mohammed tied to the Western Wall. When the Muslims speak of Al-Aqsa Mosque they are actually referring to all the Temple Mount area. However, in this context it must be said that there was nothing about the rock slide on the rampart to the Mograbi Gate that had anything to do with the safety and security of the walls of the mount plaza and the stability of the buildings on the mount.
The rampart is narrow path built between the prayer plaza of the Western Wall and the archaeological digs that have been underway for many years by archaeologists Benjamin Mazar and Meir Ben David. The rampart was made after the Six-Day War in the wake of the demolition of the Mograbi (Moroccan) quarter, to make room for the plaza. Most of the Mograbi quarter belonged to the Waqf of Abu Medein, and a special gate led from the quarter into the Temple Mount above. In Arabic, there are two gates that carry the name Mograbi Gate. The first is the gate in the Turkish wall around the city, known as Dung Gate, through which one now reaches the Western Wall and the other is the gate in the wall of the mount itself, at the top of the rampart that fell.
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I would have found this article more helpful if it had included a diagram or two of the area.
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