Sec-Gen of Palestinian National Committee: Israel hasn’t found any Jewish archaeological artifacts in Jerusalem, lies that “Jerusalem has been a holy site to the Jews for thousands of years”

      “The occupation’s [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] called to his people this week and forced [them] to participate in excavations under the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the removal of the soil from beneath it, on the pretext of a search for Jewish antiquities (see note below –Ed.)…Secretary General of the Palestinian National Committee for Education, Culture, and Science Murad Al-Sudani emphasized that the fact that the occupation authorities continue to excavate under the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in Islamic graves, and in the Old City of Jerusalem, and continue to search for an archaeological artifact that belongs to the Jews, contradicts the false and fabricated Zionist narrative. [He added that the occupation authorities] have not found anything belonging and relating to their false narrative (sic., numerous Jewish archaeological artifacts have been found), which strengthens the latest UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) resolutions and the relevant resolutions of the international institutions, especially Resolutions 465 and 478 of the [UN] Security Council that emphasize that Jerusalem, the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Al-Buraq Wall (i.e., the Western Wall) are an Islamic heritage and waqf (i.e., an inalienable religious endowment in Islamic law) that belong only to the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims (sic., the resolutions did not make these claims. See note below). This is as opposed to the claims and falsifications of the occupation, and is in a way that rebukes the lies of the occupation’s narrative through which it has misled the global public opinion and the international community for many decades during which it claimed that Jerusalem has been a holy site to the Jews for thousands of years.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Oct. 19, 2016, in the wake of UNESCO’s resolution erasing the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, that his government would help fund the Temple Mount Sifting Project of the Ir David Foundation. The project works to recover archaeological artifacts from approximately 400 truckloads of soil removed from the Temple Mount by the Jordanian Waqf without supervision in 1999, as part of its illegal construction of the El-Marwani Mosque in the Solomon’s Stables area of the Temple Mount.

UN Security Council Resolution 465 of Mar. 1, 1980, condemned Israel for its “settlements” and rejected Israeli attempts to “change the physical character” of “the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem.”

UN Security Council Resolution 478  of Aug. 20, 1980, “censured” the Israeli law defining united Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and called on all states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from Jerusalem.