France has deployed thousands of security forces ahead of Thursday’s France-Israel football international game. Paris police are treating the event as “a high-risk match,” Agence France-Press (AFP) reported.
The heightened security comes after Israel’s “Maccabi Tel-Aviv” football club supporters went on a violent rampage in Amsterdam attacking the Netherlands’ “Ajax Amsterdam” fans, Dutch citizens including a taxi driver, and vandalizing houses flying Palestinian flags last week.
Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez told the BBC that 4,000 officers will be patrolling throughout Paris, 2500 at the Stade de France in the city’s northern suburbs and the rest on public transport and inside the capital.
He said that an additional 1,600 private security guards and an elite anti-terrorist police force would “protect the visiting Israeli squad.”
“It is a high-risk match because of an extremely tense geopolitical context,” Nuñez said.
The violence in Amsterdam on Friday, November 8, erupted following Maccabi fans’ racist chants dehumanizing and calling for violence against Arabs and disparaging the victims of the Valencia floods that killed more than 200 people in Spain.
Social media footage showed Israeli supporters chanting racist slogans such as “death to the Arabs” and ripping Palestinian flags off residential windows in Amsterdam, a city with a 15% Muslim population from Arab and Amazigh origins.
Maccabi fans were also recorded disrupting a moment of silence for the victims of the Valencia floods inside the Johan Cruyff Arena.
An Amsterdam city council member said the Israeli fans instigated the violence after arriving in the city and attacking Palestinian supporters before the match.
“They began attacking houses of people in Amsterdam with Palestinian flags, so that’s actually where the violence started,” Councilman Jazie Veldhuyzen told Al Jazeera on Friday.
Amsterdam residents reacted and “countered the attacks that started on Wednesday by the Maccabi hooligans,” he added.