About two months ago, the Israeli military establishment did not expect escalation or confrontations with the Palestinians to occur. In special briefings, military personnel expected that the biggest threat to Israel might be in Iran a thousand miles away or across the northern border with Lebanon, according to a report published by the New York newspaper. The American New York Times.
And when diplomats deployed to Israel met last March with two Israeli generals who oversee the administrative aspects of Israeli military affairs in Gaza and the West Bank;
The two generals were reassured that there were no worries about an outbreak of violence and were celebrating a long period of relative calm, according to a senior foreign diplomat, who requested anonymity, and was quoted by the New York Times report.
How did the situation in Jerusalem, Gaza and other cities reach what we are witnessing now, 7 years after the last military confrontation between Hamas and Israel, and 16 years after the last major uprising in Palestine?
The New York Times published a lengthy report that tries to answer this question, and polls analysts and specialists about the reasons for the eruption of the current military confrontation between the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and Israel and the unrest that has spread to the West Bank and Arab (Palestinian) towns inside Israel.
"turning point"
The newspaper says that 27 days before the first missile was fired from Gaza at Israeli towns this week, a group of Israeli police officers entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem, and pushed aside some of the Palestinians in the mosque at the time;
It made its way through the spacious mosque courtyard towards the loudspeaker wires that broadcast the call to prayer from the four Al-Aqsa minarets and cut them off.
That was on the evening of the first day of Ramadan, corresponding to April 13th, and it also coincided with a day of remembrance in Israel in which the dead for the sake of the Hebrew state are honored, and the Israeli President Reuven Rivlin was delivering a speech on that occasion at the Western Wall.
It is the holy Jewish site that is located below the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the sound of Tarawih prayers emanating from the loudspeakers would distort the president's speech, so they decided to silence it.
Sheikh Akrama Sabri, the Mufti of Jerusalem, comments on this procedure, saying, "That was the turning point, as their actions led to the deterioration of the situation."
"Without any doubt, it was clear to us that the Israeli police wanted to desecrate Al-Aqsa Mosque during the blessed month of Ramadan," he added.
The newspaper says that it might have been possible to forget that incident quickly, had it happened in a different year, but last April was different, as many factors suddenly combined and contributed to the swelling of the abuse incident as a snowball to turn into a major confrontation.
Israeli forces arrested Palestinian youths inside Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem after Taraweeh (Anadolu Agency)
The spark
The newspaper's report indicates that the escalation that occurred in Al-Aqsa during the month of Ramadan came at a time when the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was struggling to survive in the wake of the Israeli elections, and Hamas was seeking to expand its role within the Palestinian scene, while there was a new Palestinian generation seeking confirmation On his values, goals and identity.
Avraham Burg, the former head of the Israeli parliament, believes that the escalation that took everyone by surprise was the result of years of blockade and restrictions imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip, decades of Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and other decades of discrimination against Arabs inside Israel.
"All of the enriched uranium was ready, but it needed a spark to ignite it, and Al-Aqsa Mosque was that spark," says Burg.
He refused and protested
There was an awakening of national feelings and Arab identity among Palestinian youth who were able to express themselves through resisting a series of Israeli raids on Al-Aqsa, and protesting the plight of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, who are facing expulsion from their homes to replace them with Israeli Jews.
Immediately after the loudspeaker accident, the police closed the square outside the Damascus Gate, one of the main entrances to the Old City of Jerusalem, which Palestinian youths used to gather in at night during the month of Ramadan.
The newspaper says that Palestinian youths faced the closure decision with protest and rejection, and while the police saw these protests as chaos that must be controlled, the decision to expel from the square for many Palestinians was an insult that left behind much deeper grievances.
"It seemed as if they were trying to eliminate our presence in the city. We felt the need to stand up to them and confirm that we are here," commented Majid al-Qamari, a 27-year-old Palestinian butcher.
Faced with the insistence of Palestinian youths, the Israeli authorities were forced on April 25 to surrender and allow them to gather outside the Damascus Gate, but this came after a series of developments that expanded the scope of the crisis.
Military confrontation
Soon the events developed and the clashes expanded, some of which were with extremist Jews who attacked the Palestinians during their march in Jerusalem, and the subsequent storming by the Israeli police of the Al-Aqsa Mosque during the last ten days of Ramadan and the attack on the worshipers retreating inside it, all of which led to the military confrontation that is taking place now. .
The New York Times indicates that what Sheikh Ikrima Sabri expressed about the deterioration of the situation resulting from the silencing of the loudspeakers and the subsequent events in Al-Aqsa.
It was more destructive, wider and faster than you could possibly imagine.
It led to the outbreak of the worst violence between Israelis and Palestinians in many years, according to the newspaper, not only because of the military confrontation between Hamas and Israel, which killed at least 145 people in Gaza and 12 people in Israel so far, but it also caused In a wave of unrest and attacks in the mixed cities inhabited by Arabs and Jews.
This deterioration also sparked protests in the occupied West Bank, which resulted in the killing of 11 Palestinians on Friday by Israeli army bullets, and led to rockets being fired towards Israel from a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, and the Jordanians protested towards the border with Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian people.