THERE'S A TEMPLE MOUNT ROUND-UP in the Boston Globe. It starts with the recent earthquake damage to the Dome of the Rock and mentions the Palestinian Authority's Jewish-temple denial. Excerpts:

So far, the Palestinian newspaper Al Quds has published a front-page report that the stunning gold Dome of the Rock -- an internationally known symbol of the city -- was damaged by the quake, and the Jerusalem municipal government has requested a police permit for its inspectors to enter the highly-charged, Muslim-controlled area to check for structural damage.

A reporter who visited the mosque Wednesday saw no damage to the dome, but observed a horizontal row of fresh cracks in a westerly wall of the mosque. The cracks were nearly half an inch wide and 8 inches to 16 inches long. Worshipers and Israeli security sources said the earthquake also opened new cracks in the Marwani Mosque, which is better known to Jews and Christians as the Solomon's Stables area of the compound.

[...]

"It is a very good trigger" for rallying the Muslim masses, said a senior Israeli police official, who spoke on condition that his name not be published. "No leader of Arabs could say `I'm not involved' when Al Aqsa is invoked."

Muslims are fearful that if Jews become involved in the affairs of the site -- which was the scene of the great Jewish temple built by King Solomon at the dawn of verifiable human history, and of the Second Temple, built by King Herod, from which Jesus chased the moneylenders -- they will attempt eventually to reestablish a Jewish temple there.

Israelis worry that the "waqf," the Palestinian-dominated Muslim religious trust that has day-to-day sovereignty, is both incompetent to maintain the archeologically complex site and liable not to preserve non-Muslim antiquities found there.

The Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa have been in place since the seventh and eighth centuries, respectively, and Palestinian leaders including Yasser Arafat and the current mufti of Jerusalem, Ikrima Sabri, assert that there is no evidence the Jewish temples ever existed.

The deep distrust sometimes produces paralysis, sources on both sides acknowledge, and that could pose grave danger to the physical stability of the ancient site.

Earthquake damage is just one in a series of recent signs of physical deterioration.