Jewish settler groups are digging an extensive tunnel network under Muslim areas of Jerusalem’s Old City while building a ring of settlements around it to bolster their claim to the disputed city in any future peace deal, anti-settlement campaigners have told The Times.
One group, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said that settler tunnels could one day extend under the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, and claimed that extremists could use the access route to attack the structure in an attempt to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Settler groups flatly deny such allegations.
The tunnels are largely based on historical water wells or buried pilgrim routes, stretching from the Pool of Siloam in the Palestinian district of Silwan, where Jesus Christ is said to have cured a blind man, to the south and joining up with the Western Wall, the Jewish holy site.
Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and member of the anti-settlement group Ir Amin, believes that the underground system will then extend from the Western Wall tunnel, which is already open, via settler-owned properties in the Muslim quarter and eventually link up with an ancient quarry, run by a right-wing Jewish group and known as Solomon’s Stables, on the north side of the Old City, near the Damascus gate.
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