ABOUT 300 Muslim gravestones destroyed by Israeli bulldozers in a Jerusalem cemetery earlier this week were “fake”, the city council declared yesterday.
The council said they were set up in an attempt to snatch government land.
Responding to claims that it had demolished recently renovated Muslim graves in a centuries-old cemetery, the Jerusalem city council yesterday said the 300 tombstones it had removed were not erected over any human remains.
“The municipality and the (Israel Lands) authority destroyed around 300 dummy gravestones which were set up illegally in Independence Park on public land,” the council said in a statement, adding that a court had approved their removal. “This is a fraudulent set-up, one of the biggest in recent years, whose aim is to illegally take over state land.”
Underneath the tombstones, excavators found only “plastic bottles, cigarette packets and parts of a sprinkler system”, it said.
But the Islamic Movement, which made the first complaint on Monday, maintained that the graves all contained bodies. “Around 300 renovated tombs have been destroyed by the municipality over the last four days,” said Mahmud Abu Atta, a spokesman for the al-Aqsa Foundation. “All the tombs that we built or renovated contain bodies. We are 100 per cent sure of that.”
The demolition was near the site of a planned Museum of Tolerance to be built by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, on land belonging to the Ma’man Allah cemetery, which dates from the 12th century.
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