Thousands gather for Gay Pride parade in Israel

TEL AVIV - Thousands gathered Friday amid a large police presence at a park here for the city’s annual Gay Pride parade.

The event came one year after a masked, unidentified gunman shot dead a 26-year-old man and a 17-year-old woman at a community centre for gays in the heart of the city.

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said hundreds of policemen, border-patrol officers and volunteers were securing the event, but said their presence was equal in size to that of previous years.

Authorities received no special intelligence warnings indicating that ultra-right or ultra-religious activists would try to disturb the march, he added.

The march was scheduled to start with a minute of silence to honour the two people who died and 11 who were injured in the community centre shooting.

The gay community had called it the most lethal homophobic act in Israel’s history, and many felt it affected Tel Aviv’s image as a gay-friendly “paradise” in an otherwise largely hostile Middle East.

“This year, the challenge of the community at the pride event is huge,” Yaniv Weizman, the gay community advisor to Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, said in statement on the municipality website.

“On the one hand, we need to send out a clear message that no murderer will push us back into the closet and we will continue to march through the city with our heads held high. On the other, we need to remember the killed and the (2009) hate crime,” he added.