This is a great photo by ActiveStills, posted on this, the last Friday in Ramadan 2012, here.
Unusually, this year, because of the way the calendar fell, Ramadan has five Fridays this year — and today is the most important.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense has adopted more lenient rules this year for passage for prayer during Ramadan — because, the IDF said, of “the calm” — than in any year since the construction of The Wall [that the Israeli Ministry of Defense constructed for “security” reasons, meaning to separate Palestinians in the West Bank from Jerusalem and from Israel]…
But, these improved rules still say that only Palestinians under 16 years of age, or over 40 years of age, will be permitted to enter Jerusalem on the Fridays in Ramadan to worship.
Everybody else will have to try to apply for a permit — and that is almost impossible to obtain.
So, for the young men shown in this photo, they have no real prospect of entering Jerusalem to pray at Al-Aqsa for anything up to 22 or 23 years from now!
They do not feel they can wait…
This photo was also Tweeted, by Activestills ?@activestills: August 17, 2012 Palestinian men use a ladder to cross over the separation wall, at the Palestinian town of… http://fb.me/1SzVflVaW
ActiveStills earlier posted this photo in the same series:
But, though a lucky few might have made it across, many were caught and detained. There were Israeli Border Police waiting on the other side of The Wall. The ActiveStills photographer suggested it was significant that one of these Border Policemen was drinking rather conspicuously right in front of an obviously miserable group of detained Palestinian men:
The Border Police had a bus waiting on the other side of The Wall — but it’s a normal tourist bus, of the type that was ferrying Palestinians who had passed through Qalandia on into East Jerusalem from where they could walk into the Old City and through the crowded narrow streets to get to the Haram as-sharif where they would perform Ramadan prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque:
Other men waiting in the hot sun, after being detained by Israeli Border Police for crossing The Wall while trying to get to Al-Aqsa Mosque:
