Protesters waving Israeli flags and chanting “EU, shame on you” disrupted a visit by European diplomats to a controversial area in east Jerusalem on Monday. The diplomats visited the Givat Hamatos neighborhood a day after Israel’s Housing Ministry and Land Authority announced tenders for the construction of more than 1,200 housing units there, leading to condemnations from the Palestinians, the EU and the UN. The protesters, who numbered about 50, prevented the delegation from making a public statement. They called on the diplomats to “Go back to Europe” and called them “anti-Semites.” EU representative to the Palestinians Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, who led the delegation, called the construction plan “de facto annexation.” Critics of the project, planned along a major north-south road, say it undermines the two-state solution by blocking territorial contiguity between the northern and southern halves of the West Bank.
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