An Israeli rights group on Tuesday called on Jerusalem's new police chief to "fundamentally change" what it said was his officers' violent treatment towards the city's Palestinian residents.
In a report timed to coincide with the anniversary of Israel's 1967 occupation of east Jerusalem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said that over the past two years it had received a rising number of complaints and mounting evidence of abuses suffered by Palestinian residents.
"Residents do not view the Jerusalem District Police as a body meant to serve and protect them," the report says.
"Rather, in their eyes, it is a hostile, alien force whose power is chiefly used against them, ignoring their basic needs and security and instead favoring the interests of Jerusalem's Jewish population."
It called on police chief Nisso Shaham, appointed in April, to curb what it called "excessive" riot-control methods, to scrupulously observe regulations on the treatment of minors and to protect Palestinians from Jewish settlers.
"The new Jerusalem District Police Chief must make it his priority to fundamentally change the police's operation in east Jerusalem, so that human rights violations will no longer be part of the daily lives of Palestinians," Nisreen Alyan, a lawyer for the group, wrote.
According to the Hebrew calendar, Wednesday marks "Jerusalem Day" when Jewish Israelis celebrate what they call the 1967 "reunification" of Jerusalem with parties, parades and solemn ceremony.
Thousands of people, mostly nationalist-religious Jews, are expected to march through Jerusalem, including through Palestinian East Jerusalem, to the Western Wall, one of the holiest sites in Judaism.
Tensions in and around East Jerusalem are running high over the deeply controversial issue of Jewish construction there and the unsolved May 14 shooting death of a Palestinian teenager during protests against Israeli rule.
Relatives of the dead boy say that a shot was fired from a Jewish enclave in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan.
Police said that neither they nor anyone else used live fire there.
Palestinians are likely to be angered even further if plans by a hawkish Israeli MP go ahead.
The Jerusalem Post daily reported on Tuesday that Tzipi Hotovely, of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, was proposing a draft bill to make the use of Hebrew names in Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods compulsory on street signs and in reports on public radio.
"In our battle for Jerusalem, it is important that we recognize the historic Hebrew roots of the city," the paper quoted her as saying.
Israel captured East Jerusalem on June 7, 1967, the third day of the Six Day War, and unilaterally annexed it. In 1980, it passed a law declaring Jerusalem its "eternal and indivisible" capital.
The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem for the capital of their future state.
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