Thousands of Gazans protest on border as Israel braces for escalated violence
Some rioters throw explosives, grenades at troops who respond with tear gas and live fire; Palestinians say 122 wounded; Hamas leader in Strip visits demonstration
Thousands of Palestinians protested Friday along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, with some rioters taking part in violent clashes with Israeli troops.
Some 8,500 Palestinians took part in the border protests, one of the highest turnouts in recent months.
A number of the protesters threw explosives, grenades and Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops. The army responded with tear gas and occasional live fire.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said 122 Palestinians were wounded in the clashes, 50 of them from Israeli fire.
The IDF photographed Palestinians holding up a banner with a swastika on it.
Photographed today by a soldier stationed on the border fence with Gaza. Her relatives were murdered in the Holocaust by Nazis. Like them, she knows what the swastika means.
But today, she saw that symbol while wearing the uniform of one of the world’s strongest militaries. pic.twitter.com/fFEUkfooQV
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) August 23, 2019
Also Friday, the Fire and Rescue services said an incendiary balloon launched from Gaza sparked a small brush fire in the Eshkol Regional Council. Firefighters were working to extinguish the blaze.
Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas terror group’s leader in Gaza, visited one of the protest site’s along the border.
https://twitter.com/SuleimanMas1/status/1164926444096696320
Going into this week’s border rallies, the Israeli army was on high alert amid concern of a potential escalation after days of rising violence in the region.
There were conflicting reports as to the intentions of Hamas, which rules the territory, ahead of the afternoon demonstrations.
Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar reported that Israel was conditioning the entry of new Qatari cash into the Strip on Hamas maintaining the peace until after the Israeli elections on September 17. But it said Hamas intended to raise tensions at the protests, with sources in the organization saying events would be more violent than in recent weeks, and that Hamas was considering renewing widespread sabotage attacks on the security fence, launching of arson balloons and nighttime rioting.
However, Gaza sources quoted by Kan said Hamas was not seeking to agitate and would deploy its so-called restraint forces to ensure the demonstrations remained contained, and organizers urged participants to keep the rallies peaceful.
Meanwhile, Qatari envoy Mohammed Al-Emadi was reported to have entered Gaza Friday morning at the Erez Border Crossing, carrying his latest delivery of cash from Doha.
Israel has allowed Qatar to deliver regular infusions of millions of dollars in cash to the Strip to help stabilize the territory and prevent a humanitarian collapse and further violence.
This agreement is seen as an additional incentive for Hamas to keep violence at the border contained.
Recent days have seen an uptick in violence on the frontier. Rockets were fired at Israel from the enclave late Wednesday and early Thursday, prompting Israeli reprisal attacks.
The IDF on Thursday blamed the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad for the recent increase in violence from Gaza and called for Hamas to rein in the terror group. “We do not plan to accept terror attacks and rocket fire against our citizens,” the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee tweeted.
Hamas has also sought to distance itself from a series of cross-border attacks over the past month, painting the perpetrators as young lone-wolf Palestinian attackers exasperated by the humanitarian situation in the enclave. On Monday, Hamas leaders expressed concern that popular anger could snowball into another war with Israel.
Last week, Hamas reportedly deployed extra security forces to the border area to stop the cross-border attacks. Nonetheless, on Saturday Israel said it identified a group of armed Palestinian approaching the fence to carry out a cross-border attack and killed them with tank and helicopter fire.
On Thursday night Israeli soldiers wounded a Palestinian man who attacked them with grenades on the northern Gaza border.
Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations have recently played key roles in brokering informal ceasefires between Israel and Gaza, which have largely entailed Hamas and other terror groups halting violence in the border area in exchange for the Jewish state scaling back some of the restrictions it has imposed on the coastal enclave.
