JERUSALEM, 27 July 2004 — The Arab League yesterday appealed to the United States and the United Nations to help prevent an attack on the Al-Haram Al-Sharif compound in Jerusalem. “There are 24 Israeli extremist groups that are planning to attack and destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” said Mohamed Sobeih, Palestinian delegate at the Arab League, during the opening speech of a four-day conference in Cairo.

Sobeih charged that Israel was preparing public opinion for a strike on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, through warnings that extremist groups were plotting to target the mosque.

As the occupying power, Sobeih stressed that Israel had a responsibility to protect the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He also called on Washington to intervene and help prevent its destruction.

Abdul Latif Mamlouk, Lebanon’s representative at the Arab League, urged UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to force Israel to implement the statutes of the Geneva Convention on the protection of territories under occupation. The Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock (Omar Mosque) form the Al-Haram Al-Sharif complex.

A Jewish radical leader said yesterday Al-Haram Al-Sharif should be removed, shortly after an Israeli minister warned of a threat of an attack on the complex.

Citing intelligence reports, Security Minister Tzahi Hanegbi said there was a growing threat of a Jewish ultra-nationalist attack on the mosque complex.

“Israel has to return to the Temple Mount (the complex) and it will. It doesn’t have to be tomorrow but it has to happen. Islam must remove its hands from the Temple Mount and descend from it,” former Jewish underground leader Yehuda Etzion told Reuters amidst a series of Israeli media interviews.

Etzion has been banned from the complex since 1984, when he was arrested and imprisoned for plotting to blow it up, but has continued to call for Jews to occupy the site.

The Islamic trust that oversees the complex in Jerusalem’s Old City voiced alarm at Etzion’s latest comments. “We are worried,” Adnan Al-Husseini, director of the Waqf trust said. “Plotting against Al-Haram Al-Sharif is escalating. This subject is at the heart of the beliefs of Muslims all over the world.”

Etzion said a Jewish takeover of the compound, with two mosques built more than a millennium ago, would come through “confrontation between Israelis and Muslims.”