JERUSALEM: Police appear to have prevented hundreds of ultra-nationalist Israelis from marching around predominantly Palestinian areas of Jerusalem’s Old City on Wednesday, an event that served as one of the triggers of last year’s Israel-Gaza war.
Police set up large roadblocks outside the Old City walls, closing the main road leading down to Damascus Gate, the epicenter of last year’s unrest. Bottled up, the marchers waved Israeli flags, chanted and sang.
Earlier in the day, a small group of Palestinian protesters threw rocks at police while hundreds of Jewish visitors entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
The hilltop shrine in Jerusalem’s Old City is the third holiest in Islam, while for Jews it is their holiest site, where two temples stood in antiquity. It is the emotional ground zero for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a flashpoint for previous rounds of violence.
Amateur video from the scene appeared to show police using sponge-tipped plastic projectiles intended to be non-lethal as the protesters barricaded themselves inside the mosque. Police said a firebomb thrown by one of the protesters set a carpet outside the mosque on fire, but it was quickly extinguished. No injuries were reported.
Israeli police said a large number of officers were deployed around Jerusalem’s historic Old City, home to religious sites for Jews, Christians and Muslims, out of concern that confrontations could further ignite an already tense situation in the city during the Jewish holiday of Passover and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
“At this stage the police are not approving the protest march under the requested layout,” the police said in a statement ahead of the march, without elaborating. They could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, said Wednesday that Israel “bears full responsibility for the repercussions” if it allows the march “to approach our holy sites,” but didn’t specify what actions it would take or what its red lines would be.
Several nationalist Israeli politicians said they would be attending the march, including ultra-nationalist parliament member Itamar Ben Gvir, a disciple of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and a frequent provocateur in sensitive Palestinian neighborhoods of east Jerusalem.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a statement that he would bar Ben Gvir from going to Damascus Gate. “I don’t intend to allow petty politics to endanger human lives,” he said.
In a similar situation last May, Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired rockets toward Jerusalem as Israeli nationalists holding a flag march were making their way to the Old City. The events set off an 11-day war between Israel and the militant group Hamas that rules Gaza.
Israeli-Palestinian tensions have surged in recent weeks after a series of deadly attacks inside Israel, followed by military operations in the West Bank. On Monday, Palestinian militants fired a rocket from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel for the first time in months, and Israel responded with airstrikes. These followed days of clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians at the flashpoint holy site in Jerusalem.
Noam Nisan, one of the organizers of the planned march, told Kan public radio that it would proceed as planned Wednesday. “A Jew with a flag in Jerusalem is not a provocation,” he said.
He said that the demonstration was a response to buses being stoned earlier this week while driving to the Western Wall, the holiest place where Jews can pray, located in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Police restrict Israeli ultra-nationalists’ Jerusalem march
https://arab.news/2vyz8
Police restrict Israeli ultra-nationalists’ Jerusalem march
- Police set up large roadblocks outside the Old City walls, closing the main road leading down to Damascus Gate
- Bottled up, the marchers waved Israeli flags, chanted and sang
Drone attack on Sudan market kills 28: rights group
- Several drones struck the Al-Safiya area market outside the North Kordofan town of Sodari,
KHARTOUM: A drone attack on a crowded market in central Sudan killed 28 people, a rights group reported Monday, as the army and its paramilitary rivals traded aerial strikes in their battle for territory.
The attack occurred in a paramilitary-controlled area in the far north of Sudan’s Kordofan region, currently the fiercest frontline in the three-year-old war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
According to the Emergency Lawyers, a group monitoring atrocities in the conflict, several drones hit the Al-Safiya market outside the town of Sodari in North Kordofan on Sunday.
“The attack occurred when the market was bustling with civilians, including women, children and the elderly,” the group said, adding that the toll was preliminary.
It gave no indication of who carried out the strike.
Sodari, a remote town where desert trade routes cross, is around 230 kilometers (132 miles) northwest of El-Obeid, the state capital of North Kordofan, which the RSF has been trying to encircle for months.
The Kordofan region has seen a surge in deadly drone attacks as both sides fight over the country’s vital east-west axis, which links the western RSF-held region of Darfur, through El-Obeid, to the army-controlled capital Khartoum and the rest of Sudan.
Across vast stretches of territory, attacks by both sides — many on remote towns and villages — have killed up to dozens of civilians at a time.
Last Wednesday, two children were killed and a dozen wounded in one strike on a school, while another severely damaged a United Nations warehouse storing famine relief supplies.
After consolidating their hold on Darfur last year, the RSF has pushed east through oil- and gold-rich Kordofan, in an attempt to seize Sudan’s central corridor.
Since April 2023, the war between the army and the RSF has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced around 11 million, creating the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises.
It has also effectively split the country in two, with the army holding the center, north and east while the RSF controls the west and, with their allies, parts of the south.
