Thousands of Israelis on Wednesday marched through east Jerusalem’s Old City to commemorate 50 years since the Jewish state seized control of it in the Six-Day War.
More than 60,000 people took part in the Jerusalem Day event, culminating in celebrations at the Western Wall, police estimated, up from between 30,000 and 40,000 in previous years.
The wall is the holiest site where Jews can pray.
Photo: EPA
Singing, dancing and waving blue-and-white Israeli flags, crowds of mainly religious Jews marched through the lanes of Palestinian areas, while some crossed the walled Old City’s Jewish Quarter.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said “several hundred” officers were deployed to keep the peace.
A few hundred Israeli peace activists held a protest against what they branded the “March of Hatred” going through Arab neighborhoods.
Ari Fuld, an Israeli participant in the anniversary celebrations who carried a handgun, said it was a “miraculous day” for Jews.
“Today we are celebrating the unification of Jerusalem. Before 1967, there was a wall and Jews could not enter any of the gates, let alone pray at the Western Wall,” he said.
As the chanting Israelis marched through Arab neighborhoods, some of them banged on doors of homes and affixed stickers in Hebrew that read: “The land of Israel is all mine.”
Melech, an 18-year-old who did not give his surname, said: “When we walk on these streets, no matter if it is a Jewish section or Arab section, for us it is all a holy city.”
At the end, tens of thousands gathered next to the Western Wall, singing and dancing to loud music.
Scuffles broke out at the Damascus Gate entrance to the Old City ahead of the march as police dispersed Palestinian protesters demanding an end to the occupation of east Jerusalem.
Hossam, a Palestinian teenager who did not want to give his surname, said he wanted to defend the al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
The hilltop site in Israel-annexed east Jerusalem is known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif and includes al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. Jews call it the Temple Mount after the Jewish temples that stood there in biblical times.
The holiest site in Judaism and the third-holiest in Islam, it is central to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was seized from Jordan in the 1967 war.
Jews are allowed to visit, but not pray. Palestinians fear Israel will seek to assert further control over the site.
“We are here to protect al-Aqsa. They want to storm al-Aqsa and we must stop them,” Hossam said.
Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Hotovely, of the right-wing Likud party, had called on Jews to go up to the flash point plateau as part of the celebrations.
Earlier on Wednesday, about 10 Jews were arrested for attempting to pray there.
Israel seized east Jerusalem during the 1967 war and later annexed it in a move never recognized by the international community.
Israel proclaims Jerusalem as its united capital, while Palestinians claim the city’s eastern part as the capital of their future state.
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