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Prominent right-wing Jewish activist sworn in as lawmaker in Israeli parliament

Xinhua, May 26, 2016 Adjust font size:

A prominent right-wing Jewish activist who advocates for the rights of Jews to pray at the Jerusalem flashpoint site of Temple Mount was sworn-in as a lawmaker for the Likud party on Wednesday.

Yehuda Glick, 50, was sworn-in as a lawmaker for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, replacing Moshe Ya'alon, the outgoing defense minister who resigned from his post last week amid a recent deal to increase Netanyahu's coalition.

Glick served as the executive director of the "Temple Institute," a group calling to allow Jews to pray at Temple Mount, a site holy to both Jews and Muslims in east Jerusalem.

"As long as I am here, I will do all I can to stop the injustice taking place every day in the holiest place in the world," Glick said during his inauguration speech at the Knesset on Wednesday, referring to the Temple Mount site.

According to understandings between Israel and Jordan, from whom Israel conquered the area in the 1967 Mideast War, while Jews are allowed to visit the site and Muslims are allowed only to pray in it.

Tensions between Muslims and Jews over the site increased in the religious holidays' season last September, with Muslim worshippers fearing an Israeli "takeover" of the mount amid activists and right-wing lawmakers' visits to the site.

The tensions over the site triggered an outburst of a violence between Israelis and Palestinians throughout Israel and the West Bank, which claimed the lives of 28 Israelis and 204 Palestinians since October.

Glick himself survived an assassination attempt by a Palestinian in October 2014. He was shot in a drive-by shooting after exiting a political event advocating Jewish presence at Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Glick, who called himself a representative of "Judea, Samaria and Gaza" (Judea and Samaria are the Jewish biblical terms for the West Bank), supports the Jewish settlements and rejects the two-state solution, but also talks of the need to make sure human rights are provided for the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip areas, territories Israel conquered during the 1967 Mideast War. Endit