Trapped by mobs on Jerusalem Day: far-right Jewish rage didn’t spare journalists

Young Israelis take over the Muslim Quarter on Jerusalem Day, 14 May 2026.

Linda Dayan reports in Haaretz on 14 May 2026:

“You need to stop filming, you’re hurting Israel’s image,” a young Haredi man told me in English in Jerusalem’s Old City, as Israeli teenagers began to stream in ahead of the annual Jerusalem Day flag march. Beside him, young boys, no older than 12-years-old, tried to cover my phone’s camera with their hands and kippot. A group of far-right teens had gathered outside Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Muslim Quarter, chanting “death to Arabs.”

“I think what’s hurting Israel’s image is that they’re doing this, not that I’m filming it. I wouldn’t be filming it if they weren’t doing it,” I responded.  “You might be right,” he reasoned, “but filming this gives us a bad name abroad.”

Jerusalem Day is a national holiday marking the liberation of the city from Jordanian control after the Six-Day War in 1967. Each year on this day, mobs of far-right youths parade through the Old City, harassing and assaulting Arab shopkeepers. This often comes to a head during the flag march, an event organized by far-right groups in which attendees parade through the Old City with Israeli Flags. That wasn’t set to begin until 4 P.M., but some people want to start a little early.

Earlier on Thursday, at around 1 P.M., mobs had begun to roam – teenagers in thickly knitted kippot and streaming peyot, the youngest among them no older than 11. Despite police blockades, they had managed to come through in droves, seeking out shops that remained open. Most shopkeepers in the Muslim Quarter close their shops, fearing violence.

On Al-Hanqa alley, a group ran through while banging on the shops’ closed shutters. They approached an open shop, and the calamity began: shouting, throwing chairs, glass bottles flying in either direction. Activists from the Jewish-Arab grassroots movement Standing Together, there to help protect Arab residents of the city, tried to put themselves between the mob and the Arab men, but the violence continued.

I thought I was just caught in the crossfire, but hadn’t realized that I, wearing my press card, was also a target. I ducked into a recess in the wall. A glass bottle shattered on the ground beside me; a small shard was all that hit me. The projectiles kept coming, until they suddenly stopped.

One shopkeeper, shaking, asked me in English why this was happening. He had a red mark on his forearm where members of the mob pushed him. “They said terrible things about the Prophet Muhammad,” he retold. He has a family, he had just come by to check on something at his store.

He had to get back to Damascus Gate, but he was afraid of making his way alone. I told him I’d go with him, and he agreed, even though it was clear to us both that anyone on the attack would be coming for us both. “I’m just looking for humans, people with humanity,” he told me as we approached the barricades. We wished each other peace and safety, but something about it felt impossibly empty.

Back in the Old City, more groups were roaming. One overturned a shop near the area’s historic churches, leaving wares shattered on the ground – decorative plates, a menorah, a shofar. The group, convinced that it is illegal to film them, tried to block the journalists’ cameras and spat at local residents who were shouting back at them. The city was theirs – an idea only strengthened by the failure of the thousands of police officers deployed to the area to intervene.

Just inside the gate, as journalists and photographers took pictures, the mob jeered at them – one teen took the lens off a photographer’s camera. Police herded the media into a narrow area, the better to protect us, as the kids kept dancing. When left-wing activists responded to being pushed and taunted by members of the mob, police would drag away the activist, and the crowd would cheer.

Eventually, all the activists were ejected or encouraged away by police from the area, and just a few journalists remained. Sensing that they were winning, the young mob advanced on the journalists. A bottle hit me, still full of water; a middle schooler threw a full cup of coffee at me, giggling. They surrounded the reporters who remained, taking the phone of Times of Israel’s Charlie Summers, while one rammed me with his scooter.

The only way I knew how to respond to them was as an exasperated babysitter. “That’s not nice, don’t behave like that,” I told them. “Who taught you to speak that way?” They responded with more coffee, more water, and more shouting in my face.  When they tried to slur some of the male reporters, they couldn’t get it quite right: “What, are you some kind of homophobe?” One of the kids asked a writer. “No, I am not,” he replied, unable to suppress a smile at the surreality. Soon, they had found the word they were looking for, and started shouting that the reporters are homosexuals.

We were trapped. There was a mob in one direction and a mob in the other; there was no way out but through the people who had been harassing us for hours. When police finally came to the area, it was to push us away rather than defend us. “Go, get out of here!” Shouted a border policeman as he shoved me, still with my press card visible. I begged him, and the female officer with him, to accompany us to the gate. “I’m accompanying you, go!” The female officer shouted at us, pushing again and leaving us to get out alone.

I have been covering protests in Israel for years. I have been shoved by police, spat on by far-rightists, and baptized in coffee before. This wasn’t new. What was new was the sense of empowerment and entitlement the children – just children – felt in targeting the other. As one kid, barely 12-years-old, put his face an inch from mine, I kept asking him if he was okay – no child could be doing this unless there was something truly wrong, truly broken, inside them. “I’m okay, more okay than you’ll be,” he told me. I couldn’t take it as a threat. My heart just broke a little more.

After he left, Charlie told me he got his phone back. But two older teenagers who recognized him as a reporter followed him out of the Old City. He told me that they said to him that he needs to die. They won’t be the ones who do it, but he needs to die.

After leaving Damascus Gate, I sat outside with the other reporters to catch my breath on the steps. A police officer approached us. “Journalists? Don’t sit here, it endangers you.” The actual flag march would be officially starting soon, and they knew they wouldn’t be able to protect us.

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