Relatives gather outside the damaged home of Nadine,16, and Khalil Awaad, a father and daughter who were killed by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in their village of Dahmash near the Israeli city of Lod, Wednesday, May 12, 2021. (Heidi Levine/AP).
The escalating conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has sparked an outbreak of increasingly volatile protests by Israel’s own Arab citizens, who have taken to the streets this week in numbers unseen in two decades.
In predominantly Arab cities and those with mixed Arab and Jewish populations, demonstrations on Tuesday night quickly turned into violent confrontations with Israeli police and right-wing Israelis staging counter-demonstrations. Police fired tear gas and rubber-coated bullets, while looting and arson attacks spread.
“It was like a war here,” said Yousef, 35, a resident of the mixed city of Ramle in central Israel, who declined to give his last name for fear of arrest. He accused Israeli police of failing to stop religious Jews from assaulting people outside his mosque and instead attacking local Arabs.
In Ramle, videos circulated of right-wing Israelis pelting cars with Arab drivers. In nearby Lod, close to Israel’s international airport, Arabs attacked several synagogues and shops. And clashes and rioting also erupted in other Israeli cities, including Haifa, Acre and Sakhnin.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday declared a state of emergency in Lod, site of some of the worst violence following the funeral of a 25-year-old Arab Israeli who was shot dead Monday night. It was the first time a state of emergency had been declared in an Arab community since 1966, when Israel lifted restrictions on the movement of some Arabs put in place at Israel’s independence in 1948.
Israeli border police, who typically patrol the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, were deployed in Lod.
Israeli Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said 270 people were arrested Tuesday across the country in “wide-scale disturbances and riots.” In some cases, he said Jewish residents, who had armed themselves with bats and other weapons, were “walking in the streets to protect themselves.”
“We have not seen this kind of violence since October 2000,” said Israeli Police Chief Kobi Shabtai, referring to the Palestinian mass uprising, which spanned five years during which thousands of Israelis and Palestinians were killed.
The unrest came as Israel and Islamic militants in Gaza continued to exchange rocket fire and air strikes in some of the worst cross-border violence in years. At least 48 Gazans, including 14 children, and seven Israelis, including one teenage girl, have been killed, according to officials on the two sides.
The surge in violence came amid ongoing efforts by Israeli settlers to evict several Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem and fierce clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police at and around the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
