Tel Aviv Tribune’s correspondent reported that the Israeli occupation police allowed extremists and settlers to organize their annual march in which they raise Israeli flags tomorrow, Wednesday, in occupied Jerusalem.
The reporter added that the Israeli police mobilized 3,000 of its members to protect them, in addition to strengthening army forces in the area.
The occupation police said in a statement, “It is expected that the flag march will be held as every year and for decades on the same route as last year, from the center of Jerusalem to the Wailing Wall (Al-Buraq), through the gates of the Old City and its alleys, and its route will not pass through the Holy Mosque (Al-Aqsa Mosque).” Or its gates.
She stressed that she would work to “prevent incidents of friction and violence of any kind.”
The march is organized on what is known as Jerusalem Day, in which Israel commemorates the occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967, which it calls the Day of the Unification of Jerusalem and the establishment of Israeli and Jewish sovereignty over the city and the Jewish religious places therein.
The occupation forces force Palestinians to close their shops as the march passes through the Old City, where participants provocatively attack Palestinian homes and shops, shout slogans of “Death to the Arabs” and dance carrying Israeli flags.
The march is funded by the “Am Kalpiya” religious settlement association, the Jerusalem municipality, the Israeli Ministry of Education, and the Jewish Quarter Development and Rehabilitation Company, and the amount of funding in 2018 reached about 300 thousand dollars.
Successive Israeli governments are working intensively to Judaize Jerusalem, including Al-Aqsa Mosque, and to erase its Arab and Islamic identity.
The Palestinians cling to East Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for state, based on international legitimacy resolutions, which do not recognize Israel’s occupation of the city or its annexation in 1981.
Tensions over the march are increasing this year in light of the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, since the seventh of last October, which has left more than 118,000 Palestinians martyred and wounded, most of them children and women, and about 10,000 missing.
