A pro-Israel group Saturday assaulted an Anadolu Agency correspondent in the French capital Paris while covering a rally in support of Palestine.
Hajer M’tiri was attacked as she was photographing a group of anti-Palestinian protesters who has also gathered at the scene, after getting permission from French police on the site. One of these protesters attempted to push her down, after which several others joined in on assaulting her. Despite M’tiri’s immediate complaint, the police remained inactive.
Hundreds of people had gathered to celebrate the Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation and called for sanctions against Israel.
Pro-Israel thugs attack a female journalist for #Turkish News while she was covering pro-Palestinian rally in #Paris https://t.co/5W9cQNZwo7 pic.twitter.com/9vqCrtkBMR
— Abbs Winston (@AbbsWinston) April 3, 2017
Earlier, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and CRIF – Representative Council of the Jewish institutions of France- requested a ban on the rally, arguing it was “anti-Semitic.” However, Paris Police Prefecture gave a green light to the rally, which it said did not pose a threat to the public order and call for “racism and anti-Semitism”.
“We are here to require sanctions against a state which refuses to comply with French regulations (Official Gazette of 24 November 2016),” organisers said in a statement.
According to Palestine’s official statistics agency, Israel has until now appropriated a whopping 85 percent of historical Palestine – some 27,000 square kilometres – while leaving only 15 percent to the Palestinians. The agency went on to note that, since the beginning of 2017, the Israeli authorities had demolished more than 1,341 Palestinian homes and structures in the West Bank and Jerusalem, displacing a total of 1,620 Palestinian residents.
(MEMO, PC, Social Media)
