What happened
The Western Wall Tunnel had existed for years as an archaeological site; what changed in September 1996 was the opening of a new northern exit into the Via Dolorosa, inside the Muslim Quarter, done at night without advance notice to the Palestinian Authority or Jordan (the Hashemite custodian of Jerusalem's Islamic holy sites under a standing agreement with Israel). Palestinians read the move as Israel unilaterally altering the delicate status-quo arrangements governing the Old City's holy sites — arrangements both sides had treated as effectively frozen pending final-status talks — and protests escalated rapidly.
What made the ensuing violence especially significant was that, for the first time since Oslo, Palestinian Authority police — armed and trained partly with Israeli cooperation as part of the peace process's security arrangements — exchanged fire directly with Israeli soldiers, a scenario the Oslo framework's security coordination had been specifically designed to prevent. Netanyahu's own security cabinet had reportedly warned in advance that opening the tunnel exit without coordination risked exactly this kind of escalation; the decision to proceed anyway is why this entry attributes the resulting deaths to a specific governmental choice rather than an unforeseeable reaction.