JERUSALEM, Israeli police Thursday night attacked Palestinians at Bab al-Amoud in the occupied city of East Jerusalem, according to local sources.

They said that the heavily-armed police started forcing Palestinian youths who gathered at Bab al-Amoud, also known as Damascus Gate, to allow settlers to tour it.

Police also blocked roads and alleys in the Old City, especially around Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, to facilitate the settlers’ march to the area.

Raising Israeli flags and chanting “The people of Israel are alive” and “The Kahana is alive”, dozens of settlers marched to Bab al-Amoud and headed to the Old City through Al-Ghawanma gate, one of the gates of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The settlers’ march to Bab al-Amoud is reminiscent of the so-called “Flag March”, annually organized by Israeli Jewish supremacists to celebrate Israel’s occupation and colonization of East Jerusalem since 1967.

Each year, thousands of Israeli members of far-right groups participate in the march, waving Israeli flags and chanting racist and genocidal slogans, as they pass by Palestinian onlookers and businesses passing through Jerusalem’s iconic Damascus Gate, entering the narrow alleys of the Old City’s Muslim Quarter and ending at the Western Wall plaza, created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem’s ancient Moroccan Quarter in the first days of the occupation.

Expressing their religious as well as their ethnic hatred, the fanatical participants frequently belt out racist slogans, including “Muhammad is dead,” to denigrate the prophet of Islam and the faith of Muslims, and “Zachreni Na,” with its call for ethnic cleansing: “Palestine – May their name be wiped out!”

Israel uses the Jewish nationalist name “Judea and Samaria” to refer to the occupied West Bank to reinforce its bogus claims to the territory and to give them a veneer of historical and religious legitimacy.

Source: Palestine News & Info Agency