Jerusalem

JERUSALEM -- Israeli police shot to death at least 19 Palestinians on the Temple Mount yesterday, injured more than 140 others and sent thousands of Jews worshiping at the Western Wall fleeing in panic to escape violence that turned holy sites into battlefields littered with bodies.Each side's worst fears about the other seemed to come true in the bloodiest clash in the city since Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967, as Palestinians threw rocks at Jews praying at Judaism's holiest site and police firing their guns stormed into the area around one of Islam's most venerated mosques.

JERUSALEM -- "Coffee?"It is the first thing a merchant says. "You want coffee, tea?"Maybe you just want to get on with a purchase. No time for coffee. But it is too late. Nothing is done quickly in a Middle Eastern bazaar.Relationships here have a deliberate, slow rhythm, and woe to the person who tries to hurry the pace. Local commerce, like diplomacy, follows certain inflexible rules.The merchant has extended a kindness. You are expected to take a seat. It is an invitation to prepare for the labyrinth of negotiations to come.

JERUSALEM -- Two suicide bombs exploded yesterday in the city's bustling Jewish market, killing 15 people, injuring scores of other shoppers and delivering a critical wound to a peace process that had just started showing signs of life again.The militant wing of the Islamic group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack in which the dead included the two suicide bombers, said Israeli police.The terrorist group also gave Israel a Sunday night deadline to release all Palestinian prisoners held in its jails, according to a flier delivered to an international news agency.

JERUSALEM -- What do you call a box into which voters put their ballots?Call it a voting receptacle. Call it a mailbox. Just don't call it a ballot box, Israel says.The latest battle for control of Jerusalem has begun over a myriad of small and seemingly petty symbols as Palestinains prepare to vote tomorrow in their first national election.Symbols such as what to call the act of Palestinians casting ballots in Jerusalem."This is not an election in East Jerusalem," insists Maj. Gen. Oren Shahor, the Israeli coordinator of government activities.

JERUSALEM - A car bomb exploded near a crowded West Jerusalem market yesterday, killing two Israelis and pushing a five-week battle between Israel and the Palestinians across a new threshold of fear. This was the first attack since the uprising began Sept. 28 aimed directly at Israeli civilians inside territory that is not in dispute. It appeared to set back, if not overturn, steps toward a cease-fire worked out hours before by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

JERUSALEM -- In the hours before dawn, a Muslim custodian carrying an ancient iron key approaches the heavy wooden doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the holiest shrine in Christendom. In a ritual repeated every day for centuries, a voice calls from inside, a ladder is passed through a trap door, and the custodian climbs it to reach the keyhole high in the arched door to unlock it from the outside. Three monks, one a Catholic Franciscan, the others Greek and Armenian Orthodox, look on as the custodian pulls the door open.

The Israeli mayor of Jerusalem called the escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians a state of war that he believes will continue in deadly spurts for another decade. "It's not going to end," Mayor Ehud Olmert, a leader of the ruling right-wing Likud bloc, said during a meeting with The Sun's editorial board yesterday. "Two sides have to want to end it. One side does not want to end it." Olmert placed full blame for the violence on Yasser Arafat, saying the Palestinian leader "does not want peace."

JERUSALEM -- A Palestinian laborer was stabbed to death in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood yesterday in what the police said was apparently an act of revenge for the fatal stabbing of a yeshiva student in the Old City last week.The construction worker, Khayri Alqam, 51, a father of nine, was stabbed in the back about 5: 30 a.m. on his way to work in the Beit Yisrael neighborhood, a short walk from East Jerusalem.At the crime scene the police found evidence, which they would not disclose, that they said linked the attack to the killing of the yeshiva student.

JERUSALEM -- Just about any Middle East scholar, politician or street merchant will tell you the same thing. All roads to peace must eventually lead through Jerusalem.For the moment, the route looks impassable.That's why the Gaza-Jericho agreement due to be signed tomorrow in Washington skirts the issue of who should rule the ancient city that is sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims.Would-be peacemakers over the years have proposed at least 56 solutions for dividing the spoils of Jerusalem.

JERUSALEM -- In the Magic Kingdom, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel -- which suits the Israelis, but not the Arabs.So the depiction of Jerusalem in the Israeli exhibit at Walt Disney Co.'s millennium celebration set to open in Florida Oct. 1 has Arab leaders and Arab-American and Muslim organizations calling for a boycott of Disney theme parks and products.Israel, which has contributed about a third of the at least $6 million cost of the exhibit, argues that the display is nonpolitical and portrays Jerusalem as the seat of the three great religions, Islam included.