Israel fires on Palestinians protesting ‘flag march’ in Gaza

Israeli forces reportedly opened fire against Palestinians who joined a demonstration on the besieged Gaza Strip’s eastern border with Israel.

Tens of thousands of Israeli nationalists marched through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s walled Old City under heavy security on Thursday in an annual event that drew condemnation from Palestinians.

However, dozens of Palestinian protesters gathered along the perimeter fence separating Gaza and Israel, raising Palestinian flags, burning tires and Israeli flags, and throwing stones toward the heavily guarded frontier.

Israeli troops fired tear gas and rubber bullets toward protesters, hurting three people, according to local media reports. There was no immediate comment from Gaza’s health authorities.

The protest ended without further violence that could have threatened a flare-up. It comes days after an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire ended five days of fighting between Israel and the smaller, more radical Islamic Jihad militant group in Gaza.

The parade is the main celebration on Jerusalem Day when Israel marks its capture of Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war. The event has become a show of force for Jewish nationalists and, for Palestinians, a blatant provocation meant to undermine their ties to the city.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for the Palestinian president in the occupied West Bank, said allowing the march to snake through Palestinian areas of the Old City “will only lead to a rise in tension and could lead to an explosion.”

In a test ahead of the parade, nearly 1,300 Jews visited Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site earlier Thursday, about half the number of last year, according to Beyadenu, an activist group that promotes Jewish visits to the site. Police were seen escorting groups of Jewish visitors walking through the compound and five members of the far-right coalition government also arrived at the site, the group said.

Jordan, Israel’s neighbour which acts as a custodian of the Jerusalem shrine, condemned the Jewish visits there and the trajectory of the march. Egypt, the first Arab country to make peace with Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, which established ties with Israel as part of the 2020 Abraham Accords, also condemned the visits to the site.

The hilltop compound is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, home to the ancient Jewish Temples, and is the holiest site in Judaism. Palestinians revere it as the Noble Sanctuary, and it is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

Under longstanding agreements, Jews are permitted to visit the site but not pray there. But an increase in such visits, along with scenes of some Jews quietly praying, has raised concerns among Palestinians that Israel is trying to alter the status quo — a charge Israel denies.

The competing claims to the site lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and often spill over into violence, including a 2021 war between Israel and Hamas.

FLAG MARCHES

Palestinians view the heavily policed Jerusalem Day procession as part of a broader campaign to bolster Jewish presence across the city to their detriment.

Israel, which decades ago annexed East Jerusalem in a move that has not won international recognition, regards the entire city as its capital. Palestinians want East Jerusalem, the part captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a future state that would include the West Bank and Gaza.

“Jerusalem, with its Islamic and Christian sanctities, is the eternal capital of the State of Palestine,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said in a statement.

Palestinians organised their own flag marches across the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Palestinian Islamist-ruled Gaza on Thursday, with some processions only a few hundred metres away from the Israel-Gaza separation fence.

In Gaza, senior Hamas official Bassem Naim said the group was not interested in an escalation of conflict with Israel.

During the 2021 march, Hamas, the Islamist group that governs the blockaded coastal enclave, fired rockets into Israel that triggered an 11-day war which killed at least 250 Palestinians in Gaza and 13 people in Israel.

Last month, an Israeli police raid in the Al-Aqsa compound drew rocket fire from groups in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

Hamas has cast itself as a defender of Jerusalem’s Palestinians and Muslim holy sites in recent years. But with another round of fighting between Israel and Gaza militants ending only last week, in which 34 Palestinians and an Israeli were killed, the appetite for more hostilities appeared low.

Egypt, which mediated Saturday’s truce, spoke to Israeli and Palestinian factions ahead of the march in effort to reduce tensions.

With inputs from agencies.

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