Jewish worshippers conflict with police at pilgrimage website in Israel’s Mount Meron

A crowd of Jewish worshippers broke by police boundaries on Thursday at an annual pilgrimage in Israel’s Mount Meron, a yr after 45 folks had been crushed to dying in a stampede.

Israeli police stated “dozens of extremists” broke into a piece of the spiritual website whereas “wildly flinging the fences and endangering human life.”

The police retreated from the location when a bunch of worshippers broke boundaries and stormed in, an AFP photographer stated, including that officers later returned.

More than 10,000 trustworthy had converged on the location beneath tightened safety measures for the beginning of the pilgrimage on Wednesday.

The Mount Meron pilgrimage happens on the Lag BaOmer vacation, when primarily ultra-Orthodox Jews throng the location of the tomb of revered second century rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai.

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On April 30 final yr, a stampede broke out within the male part of the gender-divided website as the dimensions of the group turned a slender passageway right into a lethal choke-point.

At least 16 kids had been amongst these trampled to dying, in what then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to as “one of the worst” disasters in Israel’s historical past.

An AFP photographer noticed a number of worshippers arrested and handcuffed by police on Thursday. In addition, some safety cameras and electrical gear on the website had been sabotaged, the photographer stated.

Police then stopped the motion of extra trustworthy towards the location, the place the pilgrimage runs till Thursday night time.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett stated Wednesday that his authorities made a “considerable investment” in new security measures to make sure there isn’t any repeat of final yr.

Among the modifications is a cap of 16,000 pilgrims allowed on the location at any given second.

On Tuesday, police stated that they had seized knives and hammers from an “extremist ultra-Orthodox faction” which allegedly meant to sabotage communications infrastructure on the website.

Some ultra-Orthodox sects are anti-Zionist and oppose the existence of the Jewish state. They are generally antagonistic to Israel’s state establishments, together with to its police forces.