Footage has emerged of Thursday night’s violence in Amsterdam which shows a group of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters close to the city’s main railway station pulling iron pipes from scaffolding to use as weapons.
The group set off fireworks and chanted anti-Palestine slogans while walking and occasionally running through the streets.
Much of the footage was taken by a young teenager vlogger Benderbij who followed the supporters and the police on camera for at least 17 minutes. At one point he describes how the group threw the iron bars at police cars and how the police appear to make an arrest.
Amsterdam-based photographer Annet de Graaf was outside Centraal Station when a group of 150 to 200 Maccabi supporters arrived, and said she could sense the negative energy.
She told the AD she saw the group running to the Victoria hotel opposite the station and attack several locals a short while later. De Graaf filmed the disturbances and posted them on social media where they were picked up by a number of international media companies.
However, many of them said the footage showed Israelis being attacked by Amsterdammers. De Graaf is now contacting the companies to have this rectified. She has also sold her footage to news agency Reuters.
Other footage in the hands of the Parool newspaper reportedly shows a group of Maccabi supporters running through the streets with belts in their hands, forcing one youngster to the ground and beating up another.
One woman also told the Parool that a group of Israelis had kicked at their front door and chanted in Hebrew after spotting a pro-Palestine poster in her window. Social media footage “confirms the tumult in the street,” the paper said.
Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema confirmed there had been some trouble with Maccabi fans on Wednesday, the day before the match, when they ripped down a Palestinian flag, attacked a taxi and chanted anti-Palestinian slogans.
Attacks on Jews
However, she said, nothing excused the attacks on Jews later on Thursday evening.
Five Maccabi supporters were taken to hospital on Thursday night after being attacked and 20 to 30 had light injuries. In total 63 people were arrested and four remain in police custody, two of whom are minors.
Police have since arrested one more person on the basis of video footage who faces assault charges.
Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof has cancelled his plans to attend the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan this week to deal with the fall out from the violence. Politicians at home and abroad have condemned the attacks on Israeli nationals as anti-Semitic.
The police and local politicians have not yet commented on the eyewitness footage showing Maccabi supporters.
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