Israel: Far-Right Protesters Shout 'Death to Arabs' During Jewish-Muslim Wedding

Far-right Israeli protesters shouted "death to the Arabs" as they tried to disrupt the wedding of a Jewish woman and Muslim man in Jaffa, Tel Aviv.

Police formed human chains to keep the protesters from the wedding hall's gates. A lawyer for the couple, Maral Malka, 23, and Mahmoud Mansour, 26, had unsuccessfully sought a court order to bar the protest. He obtained backing for police to keep protesters 200m from the wedding venue.

The protest highlighted a rise in tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel during the conflict in Gaza and the kidnap and slaying of three Israeli teens in June.

A group called Lehava, whose Hebrew initials stand for Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land, published the couple's wedding invitation on Facebook and called for people to disrupt their union.

Lehava has harassed Jewish-Arab couples in the past, often citing religious grounds for their objections to intermarriage, but it has rarely protested at the site of a wedding.

Protesters, many of them young men wearing black shirts, denounced Malka, who was born Jewish and converted to Islam before the wedding, as a "traitor against the Jewish state" and shouted epithets of hatred toward Arabs including "death to the Arabs". They sang a song with the phrase "may your village burn down".

Malka's father, Yoram Malka, said on Israeli television he objected to the wedding, calling it "a very sad event". He said he was angry his daughter had converted to Islam. Of his now son-in-law, he said: "My problem with him is that he is an Arab."

A few dozen left-wing Israelis held a counter-protest nearby holding flowers, balloons and a sign that read "love conquers all".