JERUSALEM, April 21, 2022 (BSS/AFP) - Israel struck Gaza twice early
Thursday in response to a rocket fired by Palestinian militants, as Israeli
police in Jerusalem blocked Jewish ultra-nationalist protesters from
approaching the Old City's Muslim quarter to stop them exacerbating tensions.

The strikes hit central Gaza after midnight, witnesses and security sources
said, after nearly a month of deadly violence in Israel and the Palestinian
Territories.

The Gaza rocket caused no injuries -- a fragment fell in the yard of a home
in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, police said.

But it was the second this week to be fired from Gaza, and the first to hit
Israel in months.

The armed wing of Islamist movement Hamas which rules Gaza fired several
surface-to-air rockets at Israeli planes in response, Hamas officials said.

Another Israeli strike hit south of Gaza city, eyewitnesses said.

Hours before, Israeli police had blocked crowds of Jewish ultra-nationalist
protesters from approaching the Muslim quarter in the Old City in east
Jerusalem, to head off more Israeli-Palestinian violence after weeks of
bloodshed.

Last year, a similar ultra-nationalist march was to begin in the Old City
when the Islamist Hamas movement -- rulers of the Palestinian enclave of Gaza
-- launched a barrage of rockets towards Israel, sparking an 11-day war.

More than a thousand ultra-nationalist demonstrators waving Israeli flags
gathered in the early evening, but the police blocked the crowds from
reaching Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Muslim quarter.

The demonstrators voiced support for far-right lawmaker Itamar Ben Gvir, a
controversial opposition politician. Some in the crowd shouted "death to the
Arabs".

Ben Gvir himself had been barred from the area of Damascus Gate earlier in
the day by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

"I'll say it clearly, I'm not going to blink, not going to fold," Ben Gvir
told AFP.

"I'm not allowed to enter Damascus gate. Based on what law?"

- 'Provocation' -

Tensions are high with the Jewish Passover festival coinciding with the
Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

On Tuesday, Israel had carried out its first air strike on the Gaza Strip in
months, in response to a rocket fired from the Palestinian enclave after a
weekend of violence around a Jerusalem holy site that wounded 170 people,
mostly Palestinian demonstrators.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was "deeply concerned by the
deteriorating situation in Jerusalem".

He added that he was in contact with the parties to press them "to do all
they can to lower tensions, avoid inflammatory actions and rhetoric",
according to a statement by his spokesperson in New York.

Bennett had said earlier in a statement he had blocked Ben Gvir's rally for
security reasons.

"I have no intention of allowing petty politics to endanger human lives,"
Bennett said in a statement.

"I will not allow a political provocation by Ben Gvir to endanger IDF
(Israeli army) soldiers and Israeli police officers, and render their already
heavy task even heavier".

Ben Gvir responded that "some Jews don't surrender to Hamas".

Bennett, himself a right-winger and a key figure in Israel's settlement
movement, leads an ideologically divided coalition government.

Earlier this month, his coalition lost its one-seat majority in the 120-seat
Knesset, Israel's parliament, after a member left in a dispute over the use
of leavened bread products in hospitals during Passover.

Then on Sunday, the Raam party, drawn from the country's Arab-Israeli
minority, suspended its support for the coalition following violence in and
around the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Clashes there between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli forces left
around 170 injured on Friday and Sunday.

Palestinians and Israeli Arabs had launched four deadly attacks in late March
and early April in the Jewish state that claimed 14 lives, mostly civilians.

A total of 23 Palestinians have meanwhile been killed in the violence since
March 22, including assailants who targeted Israelis, according to an AFP
tally.

Right-wing lawmakers are under pressure to quit Israel's government, which is
seen by some on the right as being too favourable to Palestinians and
Israel's Arab minority.

Pnina, a 62-year-old civil servant demonstrating in Jerusalem on Wednesday,
told AFP that "we want to go to all of Jerusalem, and our government is not
letting us."