About 30,000 Lebanese and Palestinians demonstrated in Sidon Wednesday in continued street protests to denounce Israel's "massacres" of Palestinians.
"Death to Israel. Shame on them, they are killing young children," shouted the dense crowd lead by local Christian and Muslim clerics as well as Lebanese and Palestinian party officials.
The protesters marched through the streets of this coastal city, stomping their feet on the road sprayed with the Star of David and the names of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon.
Sharon's visit last Thursday to east Jerusalem's mosque compound sparked a wave of violent clashes in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab towns inside Israel, that has left 69 dead, almost all of them Palestinians and including many children.
"Bashar and Lahoud, open the borders for us," the crowd threatened angrily, addressing Lebanese President Emile Lahoud and Syrian President Bashar Assad.
"With our soul, with our blood we shall redeem you Palestine," they shouted.
When the protesters reached the city's main square, youths torched Israeli flags and burned effigies of Sharon, Barak and US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was portrayed with a fox' face inscribed with: "the mother of Israel and the assassin of Palestine's children."
Demonstrations have been held every day for five days in Lebanese cities and Palestinian refugee camps to denounce the continued killings of Palestinians by the Israeli army.
About 367,000 Palestinians live in Lebanon, half of them in 12 refugee camps mostly in the south of the country. They or their forebears mostly fled their homes after the creation of Israel in 1948 -- SIDON, Lebanon (AFP)
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