Restless Jerusalem

Apparently a little over a week ago the Israeli Government announced that it was making two historical sites near Hebron (The Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb) in the West Bank, and making them "Official Historical Sites," which basically means they are claiming them as official Israeli territory, despite the fact that the areas are inside the West Bank.  This has set off a series of protests and clashes here in Jerusalem between Muslims and the IDF/Cops.

Last Friday after Mosque, around 30 youth barricaded themselves inside the Al-Aqsa after throwing rocks at tourists on the Temple Mount.  We went into partial lockdown mode after that, and couldn't go into the Old City or anywhere in East Jerusalem.  After a few days things simmered down and we were able to go out again.

Then tonight during lunch we heard a bunch of loud bangs and what some people described as gunfire.  Later, around dinner, we heard that some local youth were semi-blocking the street just outside our gates with a bonfire.  It wasn't anything huge, and there was no violence or anything besides a big fire, but it was definitely a statement.  Later I found out that over 300 protesters were throwing rocks at the cops and between 14 and 17 cops were hurt and a dozen or so protesters were injured. 

I rushed out to take some pictures and got a few decent ones.  After a while I saw a bunch of IDF riot cops (around 20) making their way up the road near the bottom of the center.  I snapped a few photos but my !@#!@#@! camera was set up wrong from doing some time exposures and most of them didn't turn out.  To make matters worse, I had left the camera set up to take medium res jpegs (I was playing with some time-lapse stuff...) and so all the pics responded pretty poorly to tweaking.. boo unto leaving your camera set up wrong.

Anyways, Here are a few shots.

Everything looks calm and peaceful...

Heres a "leveled" image before doing a noise reduction...

And this is the image from above, plus noise reduction!  Awesome!  These are the riot cops that were sneaking up the road by the center.

And here you can kinda see them all grouped together on the left...