Mohammed blamed tensions on what he said were unfair access restrictions for Muslims at a time of a growing Jewish presence at the mosque compound.
Police spokeswoman Luba Samri denied that police were favoring one religion over the other and refuted Palestinian claims that the kind of mass police presence ordered Friday was contributing to tensions in the area.
“We don't operate according to what the Palestinians would like,” she said. “We operate according to what we feel we need to do, based on intelligence reports and our analysis of the situation, to maintain law and order in the area.”
Recently, there have been near-daily clashes between stone-throwing Palestinians and Israeli riot police, as well as several deadly attacks by Palestinians.
Underlying the tensions is long-running frustration among the city's 300,000 Palestinians with what many of them view as oppressive Israeli practices, such as restrictions on building and a separation wall that cuts through Arab neighborhoods.
Trying to harness those frustrations, the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, with whom Israel fought a bloody 50-day war in the Gaza Strip this summer, called Friday for a “popular uprising” all over the Palestinian territories to “defend the Al-Aqsa Mosque” in Jerusalem.
“Let us make Friday a remarkable day in our struggle for protecting our rights in Jerusalem,” the movement said in a statement.
Netanyahu, meeting with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, said Friday that Israel is committed to freedom of worship in Jerusalem and blamed Palestinian militants for the rising tensions in the city.
“I have to say that we are welcoming you at a time when militant Islamic incitement is trying to fan violence in Israel, and especially in Jerusalem and especially on the Temple Mount, with the effort of changing the status quo on the Temple Mount,” he said.
Earlier in the week, Netanyahu had noted that members of his coalition who spoke out in favor of changing the status quo at the site, including by calling for the right to Jewish worship there, were expressing their private views and not speaking in the name of the government.
Rabbinical opinion over prayer at the sacred site is deeply divided. Many ultra-Orthodox rabbis oppose prayer there under current conditions as a sacrilege, while some nationalist clerics, starting in the 1990s, have encouraged attempts to pray there.
