...During the ten-year “reign” of Arafat on the Temple Mount, and in the years since his death, numerous unauthorized and archaeologically unsupervised construction projects have been carried out. In 1996 the Waqf began converting the underground area of the Mount popularly known as Solomon’s Stables into a large mosque. It has bulldozed parts of the top of the mount to make way for “open” mosques, cleaned ancient cisterns, paved over ancient areas, damaged an ancient wall, dug a trench for a utility line, and removed thousands of tons of “debris,” from the site, dumping it in the Kidron valley.3 They’ve also employed a huge electric saw to cut up ancient stones from the Temple Mount, destroying any historical evidence the stones may have offered. An analysis in the early 1990s found that the Waqf had committed more than 35 violations of Israeli antiquities law on the site...

...The latest Muslim encroachment to the Temple Mount is at the “straight joint” and the Ophel road at the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount. The “straight joint” is a masonry seam marking the end of the pre-Herodian Temple Mount and the beginning of Herod’s extension of the wall southward; the masonry in the extension abuts the masonry to the north and is not interlocked with it. This was first excavated by Charles Warren in the 19th century, and then by Kathleen Kenyon, who stopped because of the outbreak of the 1967 war. Two Muslim cemeteries, one located north of the straight joint. The area south of the straight joint has been declared an archaeological park. It has no longstanding history as a cemetery, but new Muslim graves have now been filling this area.

The Israeli government has done nothing to prevent this increasing encroachment on the Temple Mount. The IAA is powerless to interfere because it has been so ordered by the highest levels of government.

The Jerusalem Post called the state of the Temple Mount an “archaeological tragedy,” and Eilat Mazar, one of the members of a group of scholars, archaeologists, jurists and luminaries known as the Committee for the Prevention of the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount founded in 2000, said, that the government has to do something: “This is the most important site in Israel, and yet we don’t see the authorities there. We have to wake up and realize that if we don’t take care of it, the vandalism and illegal construction will continue.”7 The committee filed a complaint with the High Court of Justice in May to stop the extension of the Muslim cemeteries...