A woman visiting the Temple Mount with her family was escorted away from the Temple Mount after requesting from officers to nurse her baby in private during a Temple Mount tour.
"I went up with my husband to the Temple Mount, my daughter began to cry, and I tried to calm her down, after fifteen minutes she began to scream. We were halfway through the tour, and I understood that I needed to feed her, and that I had no other choice. I stepped aside because I didn't want to hold up the tour, I only needed a minute, maybe two to feed her," the mother of the baby told Ynet.
The policeman wasn't able to answer her question, according to Ynet, and left the woman with her baby crying from hunger in order to find a higher ranking officer to be able to respond to her request. The officer returned accompanied with a higher ranking officer 15 minutes later. They told the woman that she couldn't feed her baby on the premises at all due the fact that "it's a holy area" and offered to escort her out. "You wouldn't feed your baby in a synagogue," the commanding officer added.
The woman responded that she could just feed her baby just for a moment, out of the way in an area where no one would notice. A second woman in the area came over to stand up for the mother, and joined in what was becoming an argument. "Of course she would feed her baby [in a synagogue]," she said.
The mother responded to the officer's comment, saying, "Of course, as a man you would think that I wouldn't, however in any case, I should be allowed to nurse here."
The commanding officer said that regulations stated that she couldn't, and insisted that he escort her out.
The first officer began to tell the woman that he had asked "nicely" of her to "just to wait a minute."
The mother responded that it had been more than a minute, it had been fifteen, and her baby is hungry. "One minute passed a long time ago. There is a person here, and she is hungry, she needs to eat. It's not nice that everyone is looking at me like this."
The commanding officer repeated his initial response, and told the woman that he would escort her out of the premises, before trying to reason with the mother's husband repeating again that the mother couldn't nurse there because it was a holy place.
The father responded saying, "She nursed the baby at the Western Wall last week." Later the mother told Ynet, that she "as a religious observant Jew would have nursed her baby in the most modest way possible."
In the end, the mother nursed her baby a small amount, before leaving the Temple Mount premises, however not before the police took the ID's from the couple, and recorded the couple's names in the police system.