TEHRAN Israeli police stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Sunday after Palestinians threw stones at Jewish worshippers from the site where a Palestinian uprising started 10 months ago.

An Israeli police spokesman said earlier a police force that had stormed the area was dispersing Muslim worshippers, some of whom entered the site's two mosques. Police had surrounded the mosques, the spokesman said.

The area is revered by Muslims as Al-Haram al-Sharif and is also Judaism's holiest site -- the Temple Mount.

Dozens of Palestinians lobbed stones over the wall as Muslim clerics called for calm over mosque loudspeakers. Within minutes, Israeli troops carrying riot shields rushed into the mosque plaza in single file.

Israeli police were on heightened alert after warnings by Palestinian officials that a plan by an extremist Jewish group to lay a 4.5-ton marble cornerstone at the site could lead to violence.

"About a dozen members of the Temple Mount Faithful brought the stone by truck to the outside of the old city. They conducted a brief ceremony of several minutes and then the truck took the stone away," a police spokesman told AFP.

The Temple Mount Faithful later tried to enter the compound itself but were blocked by police.

Palestinian and Muslim leaders warned of clashes similar to those that erupted last September after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, then opposition leader, visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

At least 18 Palestinians were taken to hospital after the clashes, three of whom suffered wounds from rubber bullets and the rest either beaten or suffering from tear-gas inhalation, Palestinian hospital officials said.

An official at one hospital said some medics at the scene were prevented from treating the wounded and were beaten by Israeli police.

Arab countries, with the notable exception of Egypt and Jordan, ploughed ahead Sunday with plans to publish a blacklist of Israeli firms, and foreign companies doing business with the Zionist state.

The two-day meeting, the first international gathering of the Damascus-based Central Office for the Boycott of Israel since April 1993, studied plans drawn up for an economic blockade that could cost Israel an estimated three billion dollars per year.

"The boycott is a form of peaceful resistance, which conforms to international law since it is based on the right to self-defense and the freedom to chose one's business partners," said Ahmed Khazaa, head of the OBI.

Whilst the group's activities went into deep freeze at the start of the Oslo peace process, the new meeting served as testament to the utter shambles of Israeli-Palestinian peace prospects since fighting erupted between the two sides late last September.