...The peak of this activity, Barkai notes, came in November 1999, during the tenure of Ehud Barak as prime minister: "A trench 12 meters deep and 40 meters long was dug in front of the facade of Solomon's Stables, where the mosque had been dedicated three years before. It was a huge pit, dug by bulldozer, and trucks carried the earth out. The Waqf's request was that there be an emergency exit, but what was built was a monumental entrance to the mosque." Amir Drori, director general of the IAA at the time, described what was done as an archaeological crime.

Barkai: "I want to see how a cultured person would react if bulldozers were to mount the Acropolis. In my opinion, there should be no trucks or tractors on the Temple Mount, no heavy equipment at all. A crime was committed there, by the huge removal of a vast amount of fill, without supervision and without archaeological examination. There was a rare historic opportunity to carry out an excavation on the Temple Mount and it is immaterial to me if the director was an Arab archaeologist. Destruction was wrought there on a tremendous scale."...