40 arrests at tense France-Israel football match i Paris

PARIS: Police made 40 arrests at a tense football match between France and Israel in Paris but the city’s police chief said on Friday the huge security operation had “worked very well”.

The Nations League game at the Stade de France on Thursday took place under intense security after fans of Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv were attacked in Amsterdam last week.

Around 4,000 police and members of the French security forces patrolled inside and outside the stadium, assisted by 1,600 civilian security personnel.

Stewards had to intervene at one point to stop fans of both nations from clashing in the stands, an AFP reporter saw.

Videos posted on the X social media platform showed fans, some with Israeli flags, running along the rows of seats at the stadium while other supporters whistled and booed before members of the security team separated them.

“A fight broke out which was immediately contained by the stewards,” Paris police chief Laurent Nunez told France 2 television. “The match went very well from a security point of view.”

A security source said one person was arrested immediately after the incident and another was detained after being identified from CCTV images.

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Just 16,611 people watched the game in the 80,000-capacity stadium, the lowest attendance for a match involving the French men’s national team since the stadium was built in the late 1990s.

The match ended in a goalless draw but the point earned was enough for France to qualify for the quarter-finals of the Nations League.

In Amsterdam last week, Maccabi fans were pursued by youths on scooters and beaten after a Europa League match against Ajax.

The Israeli supporters had earlier burned a Palestinian flag, attacked a taxi and chanted anti-Arab slogans, according to city authorities.

Amsterdam’s mayor Femke Halsema called the incidents a “poisonous cocktail of anti-Semitism and hooliganism” while Dutch far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders blamed the violence on “Muslims”.

The incidents in the Netherlands took place with anti-Israeli sentiment and reported anti-Semitic acts across the world rising sharply as Israel wages wars against Iran-backed Islamist in Lebanon and Gaza.