Palestinian youths on Wednesday pulled down a barbed wire fence that Israeli authorities set up earlier in the day around part of an Islamic cemetery outside Jerusalem's Old City, a local monitoring group said.
The Wadi Hilweh Information Center in Silwan said that the youths, from the nearby Silwan neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, refused to allow Israel's Nature Authority to confiscate the land in Bab al-Rahma cemetery.
They also reportedly pulled out poles and barbed wire that in mid-August Israeli authorities put in place around land next to the cemetery belonging to the Palestinian al-Hussein and al-Ansari families.
The monitoring group said that Israel plans to turn the area along the Old City's eastern walls into a public park.
Earlier Wednesday, a local Palestinian official told Ma'an that officials from Israel's Nature Authority, under military escort, set up the barbed wire fence around a large area of Bab al-Rahma cemetery.
Mustafa Abu Zahra, who heads a committee maintaining Islamic cemeteries in occupied East Jerusalem, said that the land belongs to the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Endowment, which also oversees the adjoining Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam.
Bab al-Rahma, meaning Door of Compassion, runs along the eastern wall of Jerusalem's Old City and has been in use for more than 1,000 years.
Abu Zahra said: "Today, the (Israeli) occupation wants to designate new borders for the Islamic cemetery, but its borders and walls were made hundreds of years ago."
