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Victoria Mindova

Tear gas, flying stones and wrath covered Athens once again. This time the protests were directed against Israel's embassy in the Greek capital. Young activists of the radical Left, the Communist Youth and anarchists gathered late in the Monday afternoon to express their protest against the action of cold-blooded Israeli troops in which 19 people were killed according to the latest information.

The protest turned into an attack on the Israeli embassy on Kifias Boulevard. The protesters started to throw crushed marble, bottles and stones. The riots blocked the highways in the city that connects the northern suburbs of the capital with the town center. The traffic on Kifisias, Aleksandras and Vassilis Sofiyas boulevards was cut while the special police units were able to disperse the protesters with tear gas.

But the demonstrators separated from the police lines and headed for the parliament building. The narrow streets of central Athens resembled a scene from a film from Louis Dyu Fines, but the sole difference was that it did not seem funny. Policemen with uniforms and helmets with small motorcycles in pairs, flew back and forth across the narrow streets of Kolonaki and Abelokipi neighborhoods to cross the path of the protesters. Protesters and policemen clashed again in front of the Military History Museum on Vassilis Sofiyas Boulevard, less than a kilometer away from the Parliament of Syntagma Square. The fighting continued in front of the British Embassy – the protest groups were armed with stones, sticks and everything else they found on their way and the police again dispersed tear gas, which spread around the city center.

The whole central part of Athens near Megara muskikis, Evangelizmos and Syntagma was soaked up with the heavy smell of the tear gas up to about ten o’clock in the evening. The sellers in the newsstand and kiosks were open all the time and exposed to the tear gas effect were selling cigarettes and chewing gum with swollen eyes and running noses. "I was taking the children from ballet, when we all started to sneeze and sniff from the chemicals in the air," says for GRReporter a mother with two children who lives on a Alopekis street near Vassilis Sofiyas Boulevard.