This is supposed to be one of the holiest sites in the world,
in one of the holiest cities in the world.
But this cell phone footage,
shot inside the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem,
shows a scene that's anything but tranquil.
Trapped inside, Palestinian worshippers are tear-gassed by Israeli forces.
You can see the stained glass windows of the prayer hall being smashed
by the police, who then aim their guns through the openings.
Eventually, they enter the hall
and begin arresting dozens of people.
This scene has been repeated over and over.
Israeli police raiding the compound, locking the mosque's doors,
attacking with tear gas, rubber bullets, beatings and arrests.
In the ancient courtyard, people fight back with stones and fireworks.
This is a city under occupation, where Israelis have the ultimate power,
and they often succeed in clearing the compound to let these Jewish Israelis in.
On the surface, this
might seem like just a religious rivalry, but there's a lot more to this story.
It's about control, not just of the holy sites,
but of the land and the people who live on it.
So we're going to look at who these people are, what their goals are
and how a 1994 massacre of Palestinians at another holy site by
an Israeli American settler might shed light on where Jerusalem is headed today.
Jerusalem is at the heart of three religions: Islam, Judaism, Christianity.
But since occupying East Jerusalem in 1967,
Israel has aimed to ensure the city has a Jewish majority.
-You are stealing my house!
-And if I don't steal it, someone else is going to steal it.
To Palestinians who have been living under occupation and denied equality for decades,
Al Aqsa isn't just Islam's third holiest site.
It's a symbol of their nationhood.
Jews call Al Aqsa the Temple Mount because it's believed
to be the site where two ancient Jewish temples once stood.
The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans, roughly 2,000 years ago.
But until then, it had been
the center of Jewish worship, the holiest place for Jews.
Still, even after they occupied the site in 1967,
Israeli authorities maintained a policy
that Jews should not pray there and that only Muslims can.
But that might be changing.
And these people are driving that.
They belong to various groups that make up
what's generally referred to as the Temple Mount movement.
Their ultimate goal is to demolish the mosque -
this symbol of Palestinian nationhood, this sacred site
to Muslims worldwide, and build a third Jewish temple there.
And they're pretty open about their plans.
-For 34 years,
the Temple Institute has been preparing
for the rebuilding of the Holy Temple and the renewal of the divine service.
They've even got detailed architectural renderings of what
the temple would look like.
They receive financial support
from the Israeli government and charities in the U.S., Canada and the UK.
In recent years, they've even offered cash rewards
to Jews who enter the Al Aqsa compound or slaughter animals there,
which was part of Jewish ritual at the original temple.
For decades, these activists were dismissed by most Israelis
and constrained by the government.
But that was then.
-So a few years ago, this was considered fringe?
-Zealots, lunatics, peculiar.
Today it's mainstream.
Yehudah Glick is one of the movement's most prominent figures,
and he served in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.
He's not the only one to reach that office.
Ten years ago, there was not a single member
of the Knesset who ascended Temple Mount.
Today, we have 20 Knesset members.
It's become common for government ministers and leaders and even the Israeli
prime minister, Naftali Bennett, to talk about imposing Jewish prayers at Al Aqsa.
Until the early 2000s the number of Israeli Jews who entered
the Al Aqsa compound was very small, maybe a few dozen a year.
But as the Temple Mount movement has moved into the mainstream,
that number has recently grown to tens of thousands a year.
With the Israeli government increasingly allowing the status quo at Al Aqsa
to change, the worry is that things are going in one direction:
towards a situation where Palestinian access to it is restricted even more,
the way it has been at another holy site in the wake of a bloody mass killing.
Here's that story.
Twenty miles south of Jerusalem is the Israeli-occupied city of Hebron,
where the prophet Abraham is believed to be buried with members of his family
under this building.
Abraham is a central figure for both Jews and Muslims.
That's why Jews call this site the Cave of the Patriarchs and Muslims
refer to it as the Ibrahimi Mosque.
After the occupation began in 1967, Hebron was the first place
that Israelis settled in, in violation of international law.
Jews and Muslims both prayed at the site, but the situation was volatile.
On the morning of February 25, 1994,
hundreds of Palestinian Muslims were praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque.
An American-born Israeli settler, a reservist in the Israeli army carrying
an automatic rifle, entered the mosque, waited for worshippers
to kneel down in prayer and then started shooting.
Baruch Goldstein killed 29 people and injured more than 120.
One witness described how there were bodies and blood everywhere.
Goldstein's massacre ended when the survivors hit him
with a fire extinguisher and beat him to death.
The injured were rushed to hospitals, which were overwhelmed,
and as news of the killing spread, protests broke out across Hebron.
Israeli soldiers opened fire, killing more than 20 additional Palestinians
in the following days.
While we were researching this story, we came across a letter
published in the "New York Times" in 1981.
The author notes the difference between Palestinian and Israeli birth rates.
The solution, he writes, is for Israel to, quote, "act decisively
to remove the Arab minority from within its borders."
The letter was written by Baruch Goldstein, two years before he left
the United States for Israel.
Goldstein joined the Israeli military
and became an army doctor, but often refused to treat non-Jews.
He joined an anti-Arab
political party called Kach that was later banned for inciting racism.
He lived and was eventually buried in Kiryat Arba,
an illegal Israeli settlement in Hebron.
The settlers there strongly believe that Hebron should be theirs alone.
I think that his act brought a lot of security to the Jewish people
here in Hebron and Kiryat Arba.
After the massacre, the settlement's chief rabbi
described Goldstein as
Goldstein's grave is often visited by supporters and his tombstone reads,
"He gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah and land."
The massacre led to big changes in Hebron
at the expense of its victims, the Palestinians.
Under the pretext of securing the settlers who lived in the Old City
and preventing more violence,
the Israeli army imposed a two-week curfew on all of Hebron's Palestinians.
It made the area around the Ibrahimi Mosque permanently
off-limits to everyone except settlers and foreign tourists.
This had been a bustling marketplace, a commercial center for Palestinian life.
But after the massacre, these shopfronts were welded shut by the Israeli army.
The Old City is now cut off from the rest of Hebron by dozens
of Israeli checkpoints, making it very difficult
for most Palestinians to get there or pray at the mosque.
Israel also forcibly divided the Ibrahimi Mosque: 40% for Muslims
and 60% for Jews, but all of it under full Israeli military control.
Basically, the settlers won.
And here's how that story is connected to today.
Palestinians fear that
what happened in Hebron in 1994 could be repeated in Jerusalem.
It's not just about the possibility of another massacre,
but the fact that the people who share
Baruch Goldstein's beliefs have more power than ever in Israel.
For example, the banned political party Goldstein was part of has rebranded.
Some of its former members joined new parties and are now
in the Israeli Knesset.
They're drafting and passing laws and are part of the ruling coalition government.
Take the Otzma Yehudit party, for instance.
Its platform explicitly calls for Palestinians to leave,
saying it will work to
It also calls for Israeli sovereignty and ownership to be imposed
over the Temple Mount.
And its leader
had a photograph of Baruch Goldstein hanging on his living room wall.
For Palestinians, that's a call to cut them off from Jerusalem
and Al Aqsa, and another threat to their very presence on this land.
Most of the world's governments, including Israel's biggest backer,
the United States, have insisted for decades that a peace deal between Israelis
and Palestinians would include a formula for dividing or sharing Jerusalem.
But as the Israeli government
moves steadily in the opposite direction,
the U.S. hasn't pushed back.
Instead, it's done things that Israel believes strengthen
its claims over the entire city, like moving the U.S. embassy into Jerusalem.
But if nothing is done to stop this trend,
the consequences might be felt far beyond the Holy Land.