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ISRAEL

Demo in Stockholm over Gaza bombings

Hundreds of demonstrators marched through the Swedish capital on Monday to protest against Israeli air attacks on the Gaza Strip, setting an Israeli flag alight and chanting "Israel, murderer."

Demo in Stockholm over Gaza bombings

Organizers said some 1,000 people turned out while police said around 500 had gathered in Sergels Torg, one of Stockholm’s main squares, before marching to the Israeli embassy.

The demonstrators, mainly Muslim immigrants to Sweden, waved banners and shouted “Close the embassy,” “Gaza solidarity,” and “Israel, murderer,” and set fire to an Israeli flag painted with a swastika.

“Enough blood! We’ve seen enough,” Omar Mustafa, an organizer with the Swedish Islamic Association, told AFP.

“We don’t see any reaction from the rest of the world while there is a massacre going on,” he added.

The demonstration, which began at 1:30 pm (1230 GMT) wrapped up peacefully after a few hours.

Other protest marches were planned later on Monday in Gothenburg, as well as in several towns and cities in neighbouring Norway and Finland.

Israel on Monday bombed Gaza for a third day in an “all-out war” on Hamas, as tanks massed on the border and the Islamists fired deadly rockets in retaliation for the air raid attacks that have killed at least 318 people.

ISRAEL

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street

A former Israeli soldier was attacked in the German capital Berlin, police said Saturday, with one or several unknown assailants spraying him with an irritant and throwing him to the ground.

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street
Israeli soldiers on operation near the Gaza Strip. Photo: dpa | Ilia Yefimovich

The 29-year-old was wearing a top with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) logo when the attackers started harassing him on Friday about his religion, the police added, calling it “an anti-Semitic attack”.

Officers are seeking the assailants, who fled immediately after the attack, on suspicion of a politically-motivated crime.

Saturday is the second anniversary of an attack by a far-right gunman on a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle, who killed two in a rampage when he failed to break into the house of worship.

It was one of a string of incidents that led authorities to declare the far right and neo-Nazis Germany’s top security threat.

Also this week, a musician claimed he was turned away from a hotel in eastern city Leipzig for wearing a Star-of-David pendant.

While the allegations prompted a fierce response from a Jewish community unsettled by increasing anti-Semitic crimes, several investigations have been mounted into contradictory accounts of the incident.

In 2019, police recorded 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, an increase of 13 percent year-on-year.

“The threat is complex and comes from different directions” from jihadists to the far right, the federal government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism Felix Klein said recently.

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