Violent protests in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem have been raging nightly beyond the spotlight on the Gaza war, leading to a crackdown by Israeli police in which hundreds of Palestinians have been detained.
Street clashes with police in riot gear, military-style raids on homes late at night and stone-throwing at Israeli vehicles have marked the most serious outbreak of violence in Jerusalem since a Palestinian uprising a decade ago.
The protests erupted in July after the murder of a Palestinian teen in an alleged revenge attack by three Jews, who are standing trial. That followed the killing of three Israeli youths in the occupied West Bank by Hamas Islamist militants.
The seething tensions have underscored deepening divisions in a city that Israel claims as its “indivisible capital.”
Damage caused by Palestinians to a Jerusalem light railway, which links Arab and Jewish neighbourhoods and was once hailed by Israeli authorities as a symbol of coexistence, put a third of its carriages out of commission.
Security sweeps across East Jerusalem have arrested more than 600 Palestinians, including 150 minors, according to the Israeli police. Most have since been released on bail or put under some form of restriction.
Lawyers and family members say the raids resemble the military tactics of Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, including doors being blown off hinges, rather than urban law enforcement.
“The police’s treatment is setting alight areas that were quiet before,” said Dmitri Daliani, a Palestinian rights activist in East Jerusalem. “They think more aggression and psychological pressure will quash an uprising, but it’s only making the people more angry.”
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said that after “widescale disturbances in different neighbourhoods,” all the suspects arrested were directly involved in clashes with police, including throwing stones which wounded officers.
Israel captured East Jerusalem along with Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War. It annexed the city shortly afterwards and passed a law in 1980 that declared all of Jerusalem its capital.
