Fireworks lit during demo at Holocaust museum

FIREWORKS were ignited and eggs thrown yesterday as thousands of pro-Palestine protesters gathered outside at the opening of a National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam.

Crowds waving Palestinian flags were heard chanting ‘never again is now’ and ‘ceasefire now’ at Waterloo Square.

Organisers said they were protesting against the attendance at the ceremony of Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog.

The museum tells the stories of some of the 102,000 Jews who were deported from the Netherlands and murdered in Nazi extermination camps.

Three-quarters of Dutch Jews – including Anne Frank and her German emigré family – were among the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War.

The Rights Forum, a pro-Palestinian Dutch organisation, called

‘Slap in the face of Palestinians’

Mr Herzog’s presence ‘a slap in the face of the Palestinians who can only helplessly watch how Israel murders their loved ones and destroys their land’.

Amnesty International put up detour signs around the museum to direct Mr Herzog to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Organisers emphasised they were protesting against Mr Herzog’s presence and the war in Gaza, not the museum and what it commemorates.

Joana Cavaco, an anti-war activist with the Dutch Jewish anti-Zionist group Erev Rave, told the crowd before the ceremony: ‘For us Jews, these museums are part of our history, of our past. How is it possible such a sacred space is being used to normalise genocide today?’

Addressing the inauguration of the museum, Mr Herzog said: ‘Remember the horrors born of hatred, anti-Semitism and racism. And never again allow them to flourish.’