NEW YORK — Anti-Israel protest groups staged a rally in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, berating the residents as “settlers” and “Zionists” and sparking fights with pro-Israel counterprotesters.

The protest, led by the Pal-Awda activist group, took place in Boro Park, an area with a large Orthodox population.

Around 200 anti-Israel protesters gathered on a street in the neighborhood within a barricaded area set up by police. A crowd of Jewish residents and other pro-Israel counterprotesters demonstrated on the sidewalk across the street. Dozens of police officers separated the two sides. The protest began just after sundown and the temperature was below freezing.

The anti-Israel protesters chanted, “settlers settlers go back home, Palestine is ours alone,” “Zionists go to hell,” and “We don’t want no Zionists here.” Most wore masks or keffiyehs to cover their faces.

“How many kids did you kill today?” they shouted, to the beat of a snare drum. Some of the protesters held up their hands in an inverted triangle, a Hamas symbol, toward Jewish counterprotesters.

Others shouted insults, including at children. One man called neighborhood residents “filthy Zionist assholes,” and a woman shouted at a pair of young girls watching from a crosswalk, saying, “You’re so gross. You’re disgusting.” Children on their way home from neighborhood yeshivas peered out their bus windows at the scene.

“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” a man shouted through a megaphone.

The anti-Israel organizers said they were protesting against an Israeli real estate event in the area, accusing organizers of marketing land in the West Bank. Similar events have sparked several heated protests in the........

© The Times of Israel