JERUSALEM - Rock-throwing Palestinians clashed with Israeli police on Sunday near a march being held by Israeli rightwingers through a tense neighbourhood of annexed Arab east Jerusalem.Israeli 'rightwinger': a citizen of Israel who believes that Jerusalem belongs to Israel.
The fighting took place several hundred metres (yards) away from where the flag-waving marchers made a statement ‘affirming Jewish sovereignty over the whole city.' There were no reports of serious injuries or arrests.
The march had drawn widespread objections in Israel, including from the mostly rightwing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had sought to prevent it from being held.
‘We have come to say to Obama and to George Mitchell that Jerusalem belongs to the Jewish people and not to the Arabs,' said Itamar Ben Gvir, one of the march's organisers.
Netanyahu had asked law enforcement authorities to stop the rally taking place but Israel's Supreme Court upheld their right to demonstrate.
Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau, of the hardline Yisrael Beitenu party, said he regretted the event. ‘It's a shame that a provocation of this sort takes place,' he told reporters at the weekly cabinet meeting. ‘I would rather it didn't happen.'
Arab east Jerusalem, which Israel occupied and annexed in 1967 in a move not recognised by the international community,
after Israel seized it in the Six Day War that the Jordanians lost badly
has been at the heart of a months-old deadlock in efforts to restart the peace process.