The cleric, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein, said at a news conference on Tuesday that Israel was building the synagogue in order to cause the mosque to collapse.

Israel has formally denied the charges, stating categorically that nothing at all was being developed under the mosque, let alone a synagogue.

A key speaker at the conference was Sheikh Ekrema Sabri, who holds the position of “General Mufti for Jerusalem and Palestine” for the Palestinian Authority.

Sabri told Wafa, the news agency for the Palestine Liberation Organization (the PA’s umbrella organization), that “the Israeli authorities have been exploiting the big gates of the western side of Al-Aqsa since 1996 through conducting a series of excavation works which ended with clandestinely erecting a synagogue.”

Another speaker at the news conference was Sheikh Raed Salah, head of Israel’s Islamic movement in the Galilee. Salah recently finished serving jail time after being convicted of providing assistance to a terrorist organization.

Salah threatened that Israel will be faced with war with the entire Moslem world for opening and excavating an underground tunnel parallel to the Western Wall. That tunnel has been opened to tourists since 1996.

Regarding the purported synagogue, Salah said it contained a model of the Temple and was located 27 meters from the Mosque of Omar, located roughly on the site where the Temple once stood.

Sabri said that the construction of the synagogue, which he described as having five rooms, “proves that the Israelis did not find any sign of the Temple. That is why they made up some rooms to vaguely narrate their religious history.”

The Palestinian Authority has repeatedly used attempts to deny the existence the Jewish Temples as a means to bolster their claim that the Jewish people have no legitimate rights to the land of Israel or Jerusalem.

The PA’s denial of the Temple’s existence was raised in the negotiations that took place at Camp David in the summer of 2000, just before the outbreak of the Oslo War. The issue was one of the factors leading to the breakdown of the talks.

Leading Israeli archeologists and Biblical scholars have accused the Moslem Wakf, or religious trust, of deliberately attempting to wipe out the archeological remains of the Temple. Over the past few years, the Wakf has been carrying out large-scale excavations on the Mount, especially beneath the Al-Aksa mosque, in an effort to expand the size of the mosque to accommodate thousands of worshippers.

Much of the earth excavated from that project, which is suspected of containing rich archeological remains dating from the First and Second Temples, has been dumped as garbage at Jerusalem refuse sites.