Pro-Israel rally scrapped in Amsterdam over security concerns

After meeting with police and city officials, organizers said they could not guarantee safety in light of recent violence against Jews in France.

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(JTA) — Organizers of a pro-Israel rally in Amsterdam postponed the event indefinitely after meeting with police and city officials.

The rally, which was announced last month and scheduled to take place on Jan. 11, was “postponed because of the current situation in Paris and in coordination with the police, the municipality and security,” the Holland4Israel group wrote Friday on their Facebook page. The group did not name a new date.

On Friday, several people were killed when an Islamist gunman took over a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris. Police killed him when they moved in to free more than 20 hostages who survived the attack.

Two men who are believed to have been his accomplices were also killed at the same time in a separate operation by police at a printing shop north of Paris, where they had been holding one hostage.

The two men, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, are believed to have killed 12 people on Wednesday at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo weekly, a satirical magazine which had run numerous cartoons lampooning Islam.

“Currently, safety cannot be guaranteed and we, as an organization, do not wish to see you putting yourselves in danger,” the organizers wrote.

Anti-Semitic attacks have increased in the Netherlands since July, when Israel went to war against Hamas in Gaza over the group’s repeated targeting of civilians with rockets.

In September, Dutch police reportedly advised officials in The Hague against allowing the erection of a sukkah at a small Jewish-owned housing project surrounded by a heavily-Muslim neighborhood.

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