Leading Israeli security experts have warned Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, that right-wing Jewish extremists may be plotting to blow up the mosques on top of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City.
The warning, issued on the eve of a planned right-wing protest march around the Old City walls today, was immediately given added emphasis by Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, who supervises prayer at the Western Wall below the Mount. Rabbi Rabinowitz said he had information confirming the threat, and was urging Israel's chief rabbis to issue a declaration forbidding any such attack.
The warning to Mr Barak is contained in a new report drawn up by Keshev, an Israeli watchdog group endorsed by Mr Carmi Gillon, the former head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, and by Mr Assaf Hafetz, the former national police commissioner. Recent statements by right-wing rabbis, the experts say, "could be interpreted as giving permission for an attack on the mosques". What's more, they note, some extremists are now talking openly about "destroying the mosques".
Two factors are combining to make the threat more potent. The first is that President Clinton's current peace proposals envisage Israel relinquishing control of the Temple Mount to the Palestinian Authority - an idea that has been vehemently rejected by the Israeli right and by Orthodox Jewish leaders.
Mr Barak has also rejected the idea, but many on the Israeli right claim that he is secretly reconciled to such an arrangement, and today's Jerusalem protest has been arranged, in part, to bring home to the Prime Minister the scale of opposition to the move.
The second factor relates to the killing, in the West Bank last week, of Benjamin and Talia Kahane, by Palestinian gunmen. Mr Kahane headed an extremist right-wing faction that advocated the forced removal of Arabs from the Holy Land, and his supporters have vowed to avenge his death. Baruch Goldstein, the West Bank settler who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994, was a member of a Kahanist faction.
Further underlining the threat is the fact that, according to the Keshev report, no fewer than 10 organisations, some of them state-funded, are currently engaged in various activities related to the future construction of a third Jewish Temple which, by definition, would have to supplant the two mosques on the Mount.